Pitt has played West Virginia 187 times on the basketball court — more than any other opponent — but the game won’t happen this season because of the coronavirus pandemic, WVU coach Bob Huggins said Thursday.
“It’s been postponed, moved back, delayed, whatever,” he said. “That’s not going to happen this year.”
This year’s version of the Backyard Brawl was scheduled for Nov. 13 in Morgantown. The schools previously had agreed to play during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons.
Covid-19 restrictions have forced West Virginia and Pitt to reconfigure and shorten their 2020-21 schedules. The NCAA has ruled the season will start about Nov. 25, with a 27-game limit for schools that will play in multiteam events.
“We had a great nonconference schedule, and then we had to just about blow it up and start all over again,” Huggins said. “You have conferences like ours (the Big 12) that still don’t have their conference schedule.
“They want to play nonconference games, but they don’t know if they’re going to be able to play nonconference games.”
He said assembling a nonconference schedule has been difficult. West Virginia will play 27 games, including 18 in the Big 12 Conference, plus one each in the Big 12/SEC Challenge and the Big East/Big 12 Battle. The Mountaineers also will play three in a tournament in South Dakota and another against Richmond of the Atlantic 10.
Pitt has not released details of its schedule.
“It’s been as tough as I can remember in — how long have I been doing this? — 43 years,” Huggins said.
WVU owns a 99-88 record against Pitt, including a current four-game winning streak.
Pitt and West Virginia have been members of four conferences, dating back to 1932. The teams played at least once — sometimes two or three times — every year from 1918 through 2011-12, the last season they were both members of the Big East.
The teams did not play the next four seasons before resuming the series in 2017.
