By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
            Game to game, sometimes even day-to-day, Baylor coach Scott Drew is never really sure who's in and who's out. 
            When the eighth-ranked Bears played West Virginia (13-8, 2-6) two weeks ago in Morgantown, senior point guard James Akinjo and freshman forward Jeremy Sochan were both out with injuries. Monday night, in the return game at the Ferrell Center, it was guards LJ Cryer and Adam Flagler 
            No problem. Back in the lineup, Akinjo scored 18 of his team-high 25 points in the second half and hit five free throws in the last 1 ½ minutes as Baylor (19-3, 7-2) rallied from a 10-point second-half deficit to defeat the Mountaineers, 81-77, Monday night to complete the season sweep. 
            "During the course of a game, you can't really think about who's in or who's out. You just kind of have to get the job done," said Akinjo, who had missed two of the previous four games with a tailbone injury. 
            Cryer missed Saturday's 87-78 loss at Alabama after aggravating a foot injury, while Flagler missed Monday's game with a knee injury. The last time the Bears had their nine-player rotation fully intact was the first half of the Jan. 8 game at TCU, when Sochan suffered a sprained ankle 4 ½ minutes before the break. 
            "It's frustrating, because you're 15-0 when you have everybody," said Drew, whose team was ranked No. 1 for five-consecutive weeks before the injuries affected the last seven games. "And then, you get people back and you lose people. A lot of the times, you find out the day of the game, so it's not like you get prep time. We'll just keep grinding."
            Even with two of their top three scorers sidelined by injuries, Baylor got out to a double-digit lead in the first nine minutes. Jeremy Sochan, who finished with 13 points, nine rebounds and three assists, found fellow freshman Kendall Brown on a backside cut for a layup to put the Bears up 20-10. 
            Taz Sherman hit back-to-back 3-pointers in an 11-2 run that got the Mountaineers back within one on a Jalen Bridges dunk with 8:03 left in the first half. Akinjo hit a pair of free throws that got Baylor's lead back to seven, 30-23, before West Virginia scored 11 unanswered points and closed the half on a 16-1 run to go into the break up 39-31. 
            "Really, every coach has made an emphasis to move the ball," said Sean McNeil, who had 16 points and five rebounds for WVU. "We did that, obviously, really well tonight, which led to easy buckets We got a couple backdoor layups, some wide-open jumps. So, if we can build off that going into next week."
            West Virginia took its biggest lead of the game, 41-31, early in the second half on a bucket by Sherman, who finished with a game-high 29 points. The lead was still nine with under 10 minutes to go, when Bridges scored in the paint with a hook shot. 
            But, when Kendall Brown and Akinjo drained back-to-back treys to chip away at the deficit, momentum was back on Baylor's side. Three-pointers by Sochan and Akinjo in a 34-second stretch got the Bears back within one, then they took their first lead of the second half, 64-63, on a Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchou dunk off an assist by Dale Bonner. 
            "We were definitely getting stops and taking care of the ball," said Tchamwa Tchatchoua, who was 6-of-7 from the field and finished with 14 points, six boards, two steals and a block. "I've got to give credit them offensively. Taz Sherman was hard to guard. But, we just kept our heads down and thought about the next play each time and got rebounds."
            Another pivotal point came with 3:42 left, when Sherman had to go out with concussion-like symptoms after colliding with Sochan and sat on the bench the rest of the game with his head in his hands. 
            "I'm better off not talking about that, I'll get in trouble, but clearly something happened," West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said. "He's laying on the floor, he may have been unconscious at the beginning, and they continued to play on. They didn't stop the game to go look at it, didn't stop the game at all."
            With Sherman out, Baylor broke the tie with a floater in the lane by Matthew Mayer off a steal and dish by Sochan. Scoring all nine of his points in the last 3 ½ minutes, Mayer buried a 3-pointer sandwiched between offensive rebounds and putbacks that put the Bears on top, 77-71, with 34 seconds left. 
            "Matt's one of those guys that's capable of turning it on," Drew said of Mayer, who added seven rebounds and four assists. "Him and Jeremy, I think you could blindfold them and they'd go for more than 2-for-12 from the free throw line. "I know they were frustrated, but sometimes that carries over to the rest of you game. For Matt to put that behind him and come back and do what he did was tremendous."
            The Mountaineers got a banked-in 3-pointer by Seth Wilson with 7.2 seconds left to at least make things interesting, but Akinjo made one of two free throws to all but put it away. 
            "Give credit to Matt," Akinjo said of Mayer. "Without those baskets, we wouldn't have won that game. He wasn't having the best game, but credit to him for staying locked-in and staying engaged. I tell him he can get easy ones off the glass, because he's so athletic and good off the bounce."
            Dominating the boards 36-26, Baylor finished with a 24-2 edge in second-chance points and outscored the Mountaineers in the paint, 42-20. 
            This was the second time in two weeks that the Bears have bounced back from a loss to defeat West Virginia, which has lost six in a row. 
            Baylor plays its next two on the road, facing 10^th-ranked Kansas at 3 p.m. Saturday at Allen Fieldhouse and Kansas State at 7 p.m. next Wednesday, Feb. 9, in Manhattan.