Marquette coasted to a win in its conference opener, but the Golden Eagles will have to win on the road if they hope to earn their first-ever 2-0 Big East start.

The 10th-ranked Golden Eagles try for their eighth straight win Sunday when they visit a West Virginia team reeling from back-to-back losses in Bob Huggins' first Big East home game at his alma mater.

Marquette (11-1, 1-0) beat Providence 96-67 on Thursday, winning its Big East opener for the second time in its third season in the league. Last season, the Golden Eagles lost their first two conference games before rebounding to win eight straight.

“It's a great feeling to start off 1-0 in this league,” coach Tom Crean said. “Obviously any win you can get is a big win with as many teams as there are and with as many games as we're going to play in this league. So you've got to bottle it up and take it.”

ADVERTISEMENT In order to earn its first 2-0 Big East record, the Golden Eagles will have to win their first road game since an 81-76 victory at Wisconsin on Dec. 8. Marquette's only other games away from home came as part of the Maui Invitational in November.

Marquette went 4-4 in road conference games last season and 3-5 in 2005-06. The Mountaineers (10-3), meanwhile, have gone 7-1 at home in Big East games in each of the last two seasons.

However, West Virginia lost its conference opener 69-56 on Thursday at Notre Dame. That defeat came five days after a 88-82 double-overtime defeat to Oklahoma.

“I hope it's a wake-up call. I hope you can call it that,” said West Virginia forward Alex Ruoff, who leads the team with 16.2 points per game, after the loss to the Fighting Irish. “Otherwise, it'll be a long season. I'm anxious to get back to practice and get back to work. We need to do something.”

Ruoff had 18 points for West Virginia (10-3, 0-1), which shot a season-low 32 percent and scored 14 points fewer than its previous lowest total.

“We haven't shot very well all week,” Huggins said. “We had a bunch of guys making shots so we could spread the defense. We have starters that are shooting lower than 10 percent.”

Huggins, a Morgantown native and 1977 West Virginia graduate who coached at Cincinnati from 1989-2005, is in his first season at his alma mater after guiding Kansas State to an NIT berth in 2006-07 in his only season there. Both Cincinnati and Marquette were members of Conference USA from 1995-2005, and Huggins is 20-11 all-time against Marquette.

Huggins and the Mountaineers will be trying to slow down Marquette's impressive trio of guards. Dominic James, who leads the team with 15.3 points per game, had 21 against the Friars.

Jerel McNeal, who is averaging 13.4 points, had four points and nine assists despite battling the flu, and Wesley Matthews chipped in a season-high 16 points.

“Outstanding,” Crean said. “That's a very physical, competitive group of young men. Those three guards together, we've got a lot of other competitors on this team, but they certainly lead the way with so much and feed off of each other.”

Center Ousmane Barro had his best offensive game of the season with 14 points and nine rebounds. Marquette's 96 points was its most ever in a Big East game.

The teams have split two Big East meetings, with Marquette winning 81-63 last season at home as James scored 21 points.