MORGANTOWN — Speculation. Guess work. A final week with two games that are completely different in nature.

That is where we find Darian DeVries and the no-room-for-error Mountaineers.

The first of the two final-week games comes against Utah (also a team that salivates over a possible NCAA Tournament bid) and then back at home against Central Florida.

Very little is certain at this point in the mostly up-and-down season. A rare certainty is that a loss to Central Florida will send the Mountaineers plunging into the 2025 NIT, a supposed 32-team solace for teams missing the 68-team NCAA eyecatcher.

The Utah game is fairly late at night and few expect a West Virginia win. But the Central Florida season ender is in Morgantown and few expect a loss.

The Mountaineers carry a sometimes tarnished, sometimes burnished 17-12 record out to the wilds of Utah. Back at the Coliseum to complete the rollercoaster ride of a season, West Virginia will find itself in a must-win situation against Central Florida.

A possible (if improbable) deep run in the Big 12 tournament could also salvage a bid to the NCAA event. But the Mountaineers were tied with Kansas State and Utah for ninth place in the conference standings beginning this week.

Houston ran away and hid from its flagging brethren in the regular season standings, losing only once in the first 18 games of the regular season.

Arizona and Texas Tech lost five regular season games and Iowa State and Brigham Young had six conference losses.

The Kansas City-based conference tournament begins on March 11 and crowns a champion on March 15.

The bench-shy Mountaineers would be running on fumes if they went through the early rounds with a surprising run of wins.

Should an NCAA Tournament bid come to Devries and company it would be more than a small feather in their coonskin hat. After last year’s mostly hide-your-eyes season that ended with a 9-23 overall record, this proud-to-be-a-Mountaineer reclamation project has been more than a breath of fresh air.

There was a win at Kansas. Top-ranked Iowa State was beaten in Morgantown just before the sellout crowd engulfed the Coliseum floor with humanity.

West Virginia had never won at Kansas. The Cyclones rode in as the No.-1 ranked team in the country.

Devries’ son only was healthy enough to play in nine games. The bench was mostly threadbare of many useful reserves.

The Big 12 is so spread out from Florida to Utah and Colorado and every stopover in between that trying to catch your breath usually means slinking home with a loss.

Nobody wants to talk about the National Invitation Tournament, so beat Central Florida and hunker down in front of the television sets to watch the Selection Show on the evening of March 16.