So, once again, our beloved Mountaineers rallied from a halftime deficit to win an important in-conference game. (But, then again, aren’t they all important?)

That certainly seems to be a recurring theme for the Mounties, doesn’t it? Sleepwalk through most of the first half, get yelled at by Huggs, then turn it on in the second half and win. It has happened more times than I would like… or has it?

For this first installment of “Random Numbers”, I wanted to go back and look at just how often our guys have had to play from behind. More specifically, I wanted to see how many times (and under what circumstances) the Mountaineers ended the first half without being in the lead.

Here are the results…

To pull the numbers, I included all 22 games up to and including Saturday’s victory against St. John’s.

For that time period, our guys have started the second half without the lead a total of 8 times. (36% of the time.) The flip side, of course, is that we’ve had the halftime lead in 14 of the games (63% of the time.)

So far, for the entire season, the Mountaineers have averaged a 3.3 point lead at halftime.

When you look at the average halftime lead for all wins and all losses, you get 5.2 and -8.6, respectively.

Looking only at Big East conference games, the Mounties have averaged a -0.4 difference at halftime.

And, finally, looking at games played against ranked opponents, the number is -1.8.

Of note:

In all of our losses, we’ve been behind at halftime (by 5, 20 and 1 points).

In 5 of our wins, we’ve been behind at halftime. The largest deficit was 12 (the second largest was 11), and the average deficit in all of the 5 games was 6.6.

If you’re struggling to find any meaning in these numbers, welcome to the club. I suppose 6.6 might be the magic number, since that’s the average deficit in the games we’ve won when having to play from behind. Or, perhaps 12 is the magic number, since that’s the largest deficit we’ve survived. But, that ignores the Notre Dame game, in which we came from 20 points behind to lose by 2. Yes, we still lost, but that was an incredible second half.

So, maybe the point in all of this is that we’re never truly out of a game… regardless of how far we’ve fallen behind at halftime. And, hopefully, that’s some good experience that we can fall back on during the Big East and NCAA tournaments.