West Virginia’s basketball calendar for 2026-27 is starting to take shape, and the non-conference portion comes with plenty of early tests.
The Mountaineers announced Thursday morning that their non-league schedule includes three exhibitions, giving Ross Hodge’s team extra time to sort things out before the results start counting. The slate also includes a trip through the Players Era Tournament, where WVU will open Nov. 18 against Kansas or UNLV. The next day, the Mountaineers will face Houston, Rutgers, Florida or Notre Dame.
Hodge has already made it clear he sees the schedule as a challenge worth embracing. When he met with the media a few weeks ago, he explained why the setup became so demanding.
“The Players Era adds, obviously, a very third competitive game, where last year your MTE was just a two-game MTE down in Charleston. So you’re naturally picking up one more super competitive game.
We knew that the Pitt game was going to be on the road, and so we wanted to try to get a really good home game in the non-league. I was actually talking to Toni (Caridi) and Brad (Howe), and it was before one of our home games in the non-league last year, and we were doing the pregame interview, and we sat around and talked a little bit, and I was asking them if there was a non-league game that would excite our fan base.
And Tony mentioned it was Virginia Tech; especially for people in the southern part of the state, they may even view that rivalry on the same level as how everybody else views the Pitt game. Your players certainly enjoy playing in games like that, and then also, you do want to make sure that you’re exciting your fan base and giving them something to look forward to early in the season.
We tried to do that with the games that we’ve scheduled and some unique opportunities."
WVU’s home-only non-conference opponents are Arizona, Arizona State, Houston, Kansas State, Oklahoma State and TCU. The Mountaineers will go on the road for Baylor, BYU, Colorado, Kansas, Texas Tech and Utah.
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