In escaping Big East, West Virginia benefits from seat at ‘big boys table’
By Max Olson Jul 24, 2019
Oliver Luck remembers he was in a car, on the way to a West Virginia-Maryland football game in College Park, Md., when he got the call and found out. Pitt and Syracuse were bailing on the Big East to join the ACC. West Virginia’s athletic director was shocked. And he knew on that day — Sept. 17, 2011 — he had no choice but to make his own move.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, gosh. I’ve got some work to do,’ ” Luck said.
When he arrived at Byrd Stadium, Luck sat down with Big East commissioner John Marinatto, who had just been blindsided by the news himself. Luck says he can’t recall the reassurances Marinatto offered that morning because, truthfully, he wasn’t listening. He’d already made up his mind. Their conference was suddenly down to six football schools. The Big East was not going to survive. West Virginia had to get out.
Luck found Jim Clements, West Virginia’s president, at the game and they agreed on step one: Find out — as quickly as possible — if the ACC would take the Mountaineers. Clements, now the president of Clemson, says he won’t soon forget that chaotic Saturday.
“It was getting ready to get a little crazy,” Clements said.
Luck and Clements reached out to roughly a dozen presidents or ADs in the ACC over the next week and asked for brutally honest feedback. They didn’t have time to mess around.
“My conversations with an AD went along the lines of, ‘Don’t sugarcoat it. Don’t tell me what you think I might want to hear,’ ” said Luck, who’s now the commissioner and CEO of the XFL. “Just give me the absolute truth. Is there a shot for West Virginia in the ACC? If the answer is no, that’s fine, I won’t hold it against you. But I need to know where I’ve got to spend my time.’
“So the answers I got mirrored the answers Jim got, which was, ‘Not really.’ West Virginia doesn’t have a chance in the ACC. So we crossed it off the list. Didn’t have time to be angry or upset or argue the point. It was what it was.”
Luck responded by flying to Chicago to meet with Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. He recognized a rejection was likely, but he still had to try. The Big Ten wasn’t interested. Cross another league off the list. Now they were down to the SEC, the Big 12 or staying in what would become a non-AQ (now referred to as Group of Five) conference. West Virginia’s leaders suspect they’d be in the American Athletic Conference to this day if not for the determined efforts of Clements and Luck over a critical six-week period. For Clements, escaping the crumbling Big East became his highest priority.
“I had to get West Virginia in a Power 5 conference,” he said. “Had to. No matter what.”
They found their opportunity in that national game of musical chairs when Missouri bolted for the SEC. They found safe refuge in the Big 12 on Oct. 28, 2011. And that bold act continues to pay off in an immeasurable way for the Mountaineers’ athletic department, their university and their state. They’ll happily take the odd geographic fit because the benefits far outweigh any inconveniences. The marriage of West Virginia and the Big 12 might still seem like an odd coupling to some, but nobody is complaining seven years later. West Virginia’s current and former leadership recognize how much this unlikely alliance has benefitted them — and how rough it would have been to get left out.
“If you gave me truth serum,” current West Virginia president E. Gordon Gee said, “I probably would say there were probably a lot of doubts among the Big 12 presidents and among some of our alumni and friends of, you know, why would we do this? Well, I think years later, it turned out to be really a brilliant move. We can look through the rear-view mirror and say it was a perfect move.”
Luck and Clements had an especially valuable ally in their fight to land in the Big 12: Don Nehlen. Clements asked the Mountaineers’ Hall of Fame football coach to reach out to Big 12 interim commissioner Chuck Neinas and help make their case. They’d been great friends for decades, dating back to when Neinas was executive director of the College Football Association and Nehlen was chairman of the CFA’s coaches committee and the two worked closely together on a variety of national issues.
“Big-time,” Clements said. “That was key. That relationship was critical.”
Luck and Clements felt uniquely positioned in this chaos as an institution whose state borders ACC, Big Ten and SEC territory. So why didn’t the ACC want WVU? Current West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons was actually one of the ACC’s associate commissioners at the time. He had no say in the matter, but Lyons concedes the hurdle was a perception that West Virginia’s academics and admission standards as a land-grant university didn’t quite compare to its current members. Clements scoffs at that view, but the reality is West Virginia didn’t earn its R1 research institution classification until 2016. The Big Ten wasn’t interested in expanding beyond 12 schools that fall and waited a year before targeting East Coast expansion with Maryland and Rutgers. Luck speculates they may have had a decent shot of getting into the SEC had Missouri elected to stay put.
This wasn’t the first nor the second time the ACC denied West Virginia. This athletic department has long had a unique relationship with conference affiliation, going from the Southern Conference in the 1950s and 1960s to going independent to joining the Eastern 8 (which became the Atlantic 10) as a non-football member in 1976 to joining the Big East on a football-only basis in 1991 to becoming a full member of the league in 1996.
So finding the right fit has historically been tricky. As their latest iteration of realigning progressed, Luck and Clements didn’t have a hard time talking themselves into the Big 12 being a good match when they evaluated their potential new peers.
“The more we looked at the schools in that conference, the more people kind of felt like this would be a good fit,” Luck said. “I mean, if you go to Iowa State or Kansas State or Texas Tech or Oklahoma State, you might as well be in Morgantown. It’s very similar cultures and similar values and similar schools. They’re land grant, ag- and engineering-driven schools. In fact, I would argue — and I told a lot of people — that we had more in common with those schools than we did with Georgetown or Seton Hall or some of the Big East schools.”
And for Luck, this was a particularly opportune time to pitch what the Mountaineers could bring to a conference. Their football program went on to win the Big East and the Orange Bowl in 2011 and had gone to a bowl game every season since 2002. Bob Huggins had just led men’s basketball to a Final Four in 2010 and NCAA tournament appearances in five of the previous six years. Their revenue sports were exceedingly consistent, and that makes for an easier sell.
“I called every president in the conference, and I knew a lot of them,” Clements said. “Oliver called every AD. So it was a tag-team approach. And, you know, we were trying to convince them of the value of the academics and the athletics.”
When West Virginia saw an opportunity, the conversations with Jim Clements (left), Chuck Neinas (center) and Oliver Luck (background) came early and often. (Davis Smith / Associated Press)
Looking back on it all, Lyons admires how hard those two hustled to find West Virginia’s new home. You had to be aggressive in those times, he said, and “fight for your spot at the table.” And they were encouraged by how receptive those presidents and ADs were, by how much they wanted to add West Virginia. But until you get that call, Clements said, you never know. After the Big 12’s board of directors met in Dallas on Oct. 24, 2011, Neinas phoned Clements to formally extend an invitation.
And then the real fight began. They got the call they were in on a Monday. By Tuesday night, they thought they were out. The fight for the last spot became a political brawl, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lobbying hard behind the scenes on behalf of Louisville. This intervention infuriated West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who threatened a Senate investigation into whether McConnell did anything inappropriate or unethical “to interfere with a decision that the Big 12 had already made.” Manchin understood the ramifications went far beyond a football conference; as he said at the time, this was about “the whole perception of the state of West Virginia.” He took his outrage to another level, appearing on TV and radio stations that week to trash talk McConnell and Louisville.
“Tell him to bring it on!” Manchin told a West Virginia radio station on that Thursday. “But I’m going to fight. And I respect that, if Mitch wants to fight. But Mitch, if you lose the fight, go back and retrain and get better. OK? Louisville doesn’t have the record. They don’t have the standings or the merit that West Virginia has. You know what, Louisville? Go back and toughen up a little bit. Get better. And maybe you’ll be part of the Big 12 later on.”
Then-Oklahoma president David Boren would publicly declare no improper political influence was exerted, and McConnell and Manchin would later get into a heated argument on the Senate floor when McConnell demanded an apology and Manchin refused. In the end, West Virginia was officially invited to the Big 12 on that Friday morning.
Gordon Gee likes to say West Virginia is proudly “defending the Eastern border of the Big 12.” And that quip is probably a good way of summing up their justifications for the geographic fit of Big 12 membership: It doesn’t have to make a ton of sense.
Lyons points to the footprints of the other Power 5 leagues — the ACC stretching from Boston to Miami, the Pac-12 extending from Washington to Arizona, the Big Ten extending Nebraska to New Jersey, the SEC going from Texas to South Carolina — to remind people just how commonplace this spread is. He compares it to the trade-off of putting up with longer commutes to live in big cities. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby argues electronic footprints matter far more these days than geographic ones.
As rational as those defenses might be, the inconvenience of being located more than 700 miles away from any other Big 12 institution is undeniable.
“I wish I could say there was something negative,” Gee said. “You know, if you ask me what’s been the drawback? I’d probably say the biggest drawback is the fact that we have to travel a lot. And I think that is tough on our coaches, tough on our athletes.”
Gone are the easy two- or three-hour bus rides. The cost of team travel for West Virginia’s athletic department rose from $5 million in 2011-12 to $9.1 million in 2014-15 and was close to $8.5 million for the 2017-18 school year. The teams that charter flights — football and men’s and women’s basketball — were least impacted by the change. Lyons estimates volleyball might have it the toughest of all, as a team that plays a double round-robin conference schedule and travels on commercial flights, though the team does take some charter flights. Iowa State is closest trip at a distance of 734 miles. Texas Tech is the farthest at 1,282 miles.
Neal Brown is about to embark on his first season of building West Virginia into a Big 12 title contender. (Kevin Jairaj / USA TODAY Sports)
The Big 12 office has done its part to try to make this less burdensome from a scheduling standpoint. West Virginia football has played conference road games on back-to-back weekends just once since 2014. In basketball, the conference tries to give them back-to-back road games when possible to reduce the costly back-and-forth trips.
“I think there’s realization that they have some challenges that others don’t have,” Bowlsby said. “And you can’t ignore the fact that schools have to make the trip there. It’s a long trip. And going into Morgantown is not exactly ideal. So, yeah, I think you just find your way on those things. We try to be fair to them and want to be fair to the other nine schools as well.”
Lyons recognizes they’re asking Mountaineer fans to go farther in mileage and cost and that they’ve lost long-term rivalries. He’s tried to smooth that over by scheduling non-conference games with former rivals and regional foes — they’ll face Maryland, Virginia Tech, Pitt and Penn State in football over the next five years — and they sold more than 15,000 tickets for their neutral-site football game against Tennessee in Charlotte last season.
When it came time for the Big 12 to reassess further expansion in 2016, Gee had an opportunity to pursue adding some more nearby neighbors like Cincinnati or UConn. He was on the league’s expansion committee and initially advocated for expanding to 12 schools. As they went through the process, he changed his mind. He says there was simply no consensus.
“Sometimes you have your own driven agenda of what’s best for your institution. And sometimes you have to take that hat off and say what’s best for the conference? What’s best for the totality?” Lyons said. “And it may be best to say, hey, we could get a closer conference partner in the East, that’s great for us. But is that really the best for the league?”
Dana Holgorsen remembers how he felt when he first heard of the Big 12 move: blindsided.
He was a first-time head coach trying to win big. He says he was making mistakes daily. He didn’t have time to fret about the 2012 season or the Mountaineers’ future. Luck urged him to keep his head down and try to win as many games as possible. But this realignment news all hit in the middle of their season. His players saw the news scroll across the ESPN ticker right before a Thursday practice, the day before it became official. Holgorsen knew he needed to address it right away on the practice field.
“Usually we’d go out there, blow the whistle and just go stretch,” he said. “Well, I blew the whistle and brought the whole team up. And I was like, ‘Look, this is happening. We’re going to the Big 12. I know everything about this conference. We’ll talk about it in the offseason. We don’t need to talk about it right now. The only thing we need to worry about right now is beating Rutgers.’ ”
Two days later, West Virginia trailed 31-21 at halftime on a snowy afternoon in Piscataway and Holgorsen figured their big distraction was to blame. But his team rallied back with a second-half shutout and escaped with a 41-31 win. And then they won four of their last five and absolutely whooped Clemson with a 70-33 victory in the Orange Bowl.
“We made a big splash,” Holgorsen said. “And then it’s like, OK, we’re in that league. Now the real work starts.”
Holgorsen was good with the move. He’d just spent 11 years coaching in the Big 12. He knew exactly what he was getting into, and knew better than most this was a good fit. But the 2012 season was an eye-opening one. These Mountaineers, powered by the trio of Geno Smith, Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey, came in with so much hype and a preseason No. 11 ranking in the AP poll. They survived an insane 70-63 shootout against Baylor in their conference debut. They went down to Texas the next week and won a 48-45 thriller in front of a crowd of 101,000. They were 5-0 and ranked No. 5. And their head coach wasn’t buying it.
“I’m going, ‘We’re not very ****ing good,’ ” Holgorsen said. “‘We’re just not very good.’ ”
They had talented top-end players. They could compete. But they were good, not great. That’s what he told Luck.
“He’s like, ‘Well, Dana, I hired you to out-coach people,’” Holgorsen remembers with a laugh. “I said, ‘Yep, I know! Well, there’s a lot of good coaches in the Big 12, too.’ We had a lot of work to do.”
He was right. They lost 49-14 at Texas Tech the next week and then slid hard, dropping five in a row and finishing 7-6. They went 4-8 the following season. They learned quickly that the switch from Big East to Big 12 was dramatically different.
The competitive aspect of the conference move was challenging across all sports. But West Virginia has steadied and found success. Bob Huggins has taken their men’s basketball program to the Sweet 16 three times since joining the Big 12. Their women’s basketball program has four NCAA tournament appearances, a Big 12 tournament title and a split regular-season title. Baseball is coming off its best season yet in the Big 12, going 38-22 and earning the No. 15 overall national seed in the NCAA tournament. Women’s soccer immediately won five consecutive Big 12 regular-season titles and played for a national championship in 2016.
The obstacles were different for Mountaineer football. The coaching staff felt they had the best talent every week in the Big East. That league provided the path of least resistance to a BCS bowl. And Holgorsen had given them a scheme advantage by bringing his version of the Air Raid to a more pro-style league. Those edges were gone. Building up the core of a roster that was comparable in depth to their new foes took years. You can’t win the Big 12, Holgorsen argues, with 30 good players. You need 55 that can really play.
Another strange challenge: Holgorsen found the Mountaineers had an easier time recruiting Texas prospects when he was in the Big East than he did in the Big 12. They had to pivot their recruiting strategy: less Texas, less South Florida, more kids from nearby states who were within a five-hour drive away. “We went back to our roots,” Lyons said. Holgorsen’s staff found an advantage to their isolation. They sold Big Ten and ACC recruits on the excitement of Big 12 ball and didn’t have to contend with their conference peers for many players.
Being the Big 12 puts blueblood opponents on the schedule every year, and the Mountaineers are finding ways to maintain past rivalries too. (Ben Queen / USA TODAY Sports)
But the bigger change in recruiting started after the 4-8 season when the staff shifted to taking more and more transfers. They didn’t have time to wait for high school signees developing over four or five years. They looked to Kansas State under Bill Snyder and saw a model for more expedited roster-building and more consistent success. Since 2015, nearly 30 percent of their signees came from the junior college ranks. They continually addressed needs and reloaded with quality FBS transfers. Ten starters on the 2018 team came in as transfers.
“That’s what made us good,” Holgorsen said.
And it worked. They caught up and they managed to stay in contention. They made a real run at a Big 12 title last fall but came up short in disappointing fashion. And then Holgorsen made what he called an easy decision and left for Houston, an opportunity that provided more security and exciting potential. Lyons picked a proven program-builder in Neal Brown to embark on a new era.
Holgorsen can see many parallels between where West Virginia was at the end of its Big East run and where Houston stands today in the AAC. He knows they can compete with anybody. He may even get to lead another transition to Power 5 football someday. As tough as the Big 12 move was at times, Holgorsen can look back and say without hesitation it was absolutely worthwhile.
“You knew, over the course of time, it will make sense,” he said. “And over the course of time, it made sense.”
Gee says West Virginia now has a seat at the “big boys table” thanks to Big 12 membership. What this move has meant for West Virginia over the past seven years is in a lot of ways incalculable. Lyons recognizes this is not just an athletic arms race but an institutional one, and aligning with a higher-profile league has brought a level of national visibility that significantly boosts the university’s branding, marketing and recruiting efforts. How can you fully quantify that?
“You know the old saying: A rising tide lifts all ships,” Lyons said.
The impact on West Virginia’s athletic department is a bit easier to calculate. Big 12 membership has put them in a totally different ballpark in terms of their ability to compete financially. In the Big East, which did not have equal revenue distribution, they would have received about $9 million in their final year in the league. The Big 12 distributed $38.8 million to its members for the 2018-19 academic year. And that doesn’t include West Virginia’s third-tier rights deal with IMG, which brings in another $9 million or so in revenue. The Mountaineers’ athletic department reported $46 million in revenues in its final Big East year and brought in more than $82.8 million in 2017-18. Clements was right to call joining the Big 12 a “long-term investment” when the move became official. But the price tag to compete at the Power 5 level has also been incredibly steep.
The cost of exiting the Big East was more than $20 million. The Big 12 chipped in on paying that penalty with a $10 million loan, half of which West Virginia must pay off in $1 million installments annually. West Virginia agreed to a four-year phase-in on Big 12 revenue distribution, which meant receiving 50 percent ($10.3 million), then 67 percent ($14 million), then 85 percent ($23 million) of a full revenue share over its first three years. And just as revenue increased significantly, so did the athletic department’s reported expenses, rising from $66 million in its first Big 12 year to nearly $94 million in 2017-18. Though the increasing cost of coaching salaries, tuition and travel is a factor, this is just the new reality. And Lyons recognizes that, now that West Virginia is a fully funded Big 12 member, it still has some ground to make up on its conference peers on what he calls the “brick and mortar” front.
“We got a little bit behind a number of years,” he said. “When others were in conferences that had higher distributions, they were able to start building. Let’s just say they had roughly a 10-year head start, whereas West Virginia was really staying kind of status quo.”
Holgorsen argues that head start was more like “two and a half decades,” because the original members of the Big 12 have been fully funded since the league’s inception. It’s an important difference between West Virginia and schools like Oklahoma State, Iowa State and Kansas State, one that often goes underappreciated. Everyone else has been getting paid for a long time and they didn’t see their full cut until 2014-15.
“At West Virginia, we were behind,” Holgorsen said. “We were way behind. And quite frankly, they still are.”
But they’re making progress. They’ve built a new ballpark for baseball, a basketball practice facility, an outdoor track complex and a new aquatics center. They made $88 million in upgrades to Milan Puskar Stadium and the WVU Coliseum. Lyons revealed Phase 2 of their facilities improvements last August, a $100 million capital campaign dubbed “Climbing Higher” that includes a $55 million renovation of their football facility, $35 million in additional upgrades to the WVU Coliseum complex and new gymnastics and golf facilities.
This is the cost of doing business at the highest level, and West Virginia’s leadership knows this is worth it. As Luck reflects on their scramble to find a new conference in 2011, he bluntly admits, “The reality is there wasn’t really any other home.” They could have been stuck in the AAC, battling UCF and Houston and still getting less than $10 million in revenue distribution. Luck even suggests they “easily” could be looking at a financial crisis like the one UConn is facing.
“That would’ve been a real gut punch to people in Morgantown and the entire state,” Luck said.
Lyons and Gee do not take that lightly. In a state with no major sports teams, Gee appreciates that Mountaineer athletics plays an essential role. “We have to constantly remind ourselves about the obligation we have to bring pride and optimism to our state,” he said. And Lyons doesn’t hesitate to point out that just because they’re in a Power 5 league now doesn’t mean things can’t change in the future.
Nobody can predict what the next phase of conference realignment may bring. History can repeat itself. The shakeup of September 2011 can occur again, and they could get left behind. West Virginia needs to keep investing and improving and not take their grand opportunity for granted.
“We’ve got to continue to be a Power 5 institution,” Lyons said, “and continue to compete at a very high level and not get complacent and say, oh, we’re in the Big 12 and everything’s great and we’re going to be in the Big 12 Conference forever. We want to compete at the highest level. You don’t do that by being complacent.”
