https://www.post-gazette.com/sports...likeness-nil-ncaa-big-12/stories/202205280012
NEWSLETTERS
1
CRAIG MEYER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
cmeyer@post-gazette.com
MAY 29, 2022
5:00 AM
On Friday, the Post-Gazette spoke with West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons about the state of the Mountaineers’ major-revenue programs, the university’s athletic department as a whole, its role in the Big 12 and larger issues within college athletics.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’ve been at WVU seven years now. How do you think the athletic department has changed in your time there? What do you look at as your biggest accomplishments and biggest regrets?
A: “Humbly, I think the biggest thing that was one of my focuses when I came here as athletic director was the upgrades on a lot of our facilities. We had some new buildings and facilities and we’ve done a lot of renovations to our current facilities. That was a primary focus of mine coming in as athletic director. Needless to say, I’m very proud of what the staff has done in regards to the upgraded facilities. It has impacted each and every one of our sports. We’ve done a lot of things that have impacted our revenue sports of football and basketball, but we also just completed an athletic performance center renovation that impacts all of our Olympic sports.”
Q: Over the past year in men’s college basketball, we’ve seen some of the elder statesmen of the sport — Roy Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, even Jay Wright — retire. You have a coach at West Virginia in Bob Huggins who’s going to be 69 when next season starts. Based on your conversations with Bob, how much longer do you think he wants to go?
A: “Those are discussions that are ongoing. We didn’t perform that well on the court last year. We have a new team coming in. We really haven’t sat down and said, ‘Here’s the drop-dead date. Here’s when it’s done.’ It’s just a matter of from a personal preference and from a professional standpoint, when do you feel that’s right? The outcomes of the games and what that means is something that’s important to all of us. It’s important to Bob competitively, most of all. As long as he’s continuing to enjoy what he’s doing and we have the results that he expects as a head coach, I can see him doing this for several more years. Bob’s still young at heart and still feels he has the energy and passion to do what he’s doing as a head basketball coach. Obviously, we all know the landscape of college athletics is changing quickly and completely different from what we had five years ago, 10 years ago, especially 20 years ago. You see some of these coaches who have stepped down. It was time for them to get out because the game and the college scene is changing. That discussion has not been had with Bob. He knows it’s changing. He has to adapt. He’s a Hall of Fame coach. As long as he has the energy and the passion and we continue to perform at a high level on the basketball court, there’s not a drop-dead date.”
Q: Neal Brown is three years into his tenure and has gone 17-18 in that time. How would you assess the job he has done and what would you attribute some of his early struggles to?
A: “Overall, we would all like to be competitively better and be above the .500 mark and even better than that as we continue moving on. Coaches are evaluated on wins and losses, but I think there’s a bigger picture as an athletic director that you have to look at. The world we live in today, people want instantaneous results and that doesn’t always happen. There have been roster issues and management Neal has had to deal with. He dealt with COVID his first couple of years. Those are things a lot of coaches don’t have to deal with coming in. It’s more than the wins and losses. Would you like to see more wins? Absolutely, not only for myself as athletic director, but from him as a coach. That hasn’t happened, but at the same time, you evaluate other aspects of the staff and the program as a whole. Our recruiting is getting a lot better. We were a very young team. We lost some transfers. There’s sometimes addition by subtraction as you go through that. The culture I believe is the highest it has been in his three years from a team perspective. There’s a lot of positives. The trajectory, I think, is on the upward swing. We just need the wins to come. Are any of us happy with last year’s results and where we’re at? The answer is probably not. We want better results. I think we’re building the team and it takes time to build it. Sometimes your fanbase and others from the outside don’t understand that patience, but being in this business for a number of years, I do understand it. The evaluation aspect is bigger than just the first three years and the record. It’s where this program is headed in the future. And I think it’s a bright future.”
Q: What has the impact been of the confluence of new name, image and likeness rules and the one-time transfer rule? Do you think the landscape it has created is tenable?
A: “No one has that crystal ball to really say, ‘This is what it’s going to look like.’ If you look back almost a year now, I don’t think people anticipated that we would be in the spot we’re in today with collectives and different issues we’re dealing with. This thing continues to evolve. As an association as a whole, we have to continue to adapt and adjust along the way, especially when something that is new. I’m 100% supportive of name, image and likeness. I think there’s a lot of good there for our student-athletes. Unfortunately, at the same time, there’s a lot of bad. I think the board of the NCAA tried to make some adjustments a couple of weeks ago with their outcome of saying it shouldn’t be used in offers and inducements and different things we’re seeing around the country. But you want to give the student-athlete the opportunity to use his or her name in the right way and be able to capitalize off of that. To say we’re going to put the genie back in the bottle and we’re not going to have name, image and likeness, I think that genie is out of the bottle. You’re not going to get it back in.”
Q: West Virginia already has its own collective and is positioned to compete in this space. It’s also one of the smallest states in the country. Based on various economic metrics, it’s one of the poorest states in the country and there aren’t a lot of major corporations in the state. Do you think West Virginia is at any kind of disadvantage at all in the NIL era?
A: “I don’t. Everybody can make excuses, but we have advantages. We have 1.8 million people in this state that are very passionate about West Virginia athletics. We may be a small state, but there are a lot of people behind West Virginia without any pro teams and other Power Five institutions within the state. We compete at the highest levels and I don’t expect name, image and likeness to be anything different. ... The media wants to report on the huge, huge deals, but that’s not the reality. That may be 1% of the student-athletes in college sports that get six- or seven-figure deals. I don’t see a lot of Fortune 500 companies jumping into that, so that’s not impacting us because we don’t have Fortune 500 companies here. If you really look at it, it’s corporations and it’s individuals that are considered boosters that have supported your program in the past.
Q: It will change with the addition of schools like Cincinnati to the Big 12, but what have been the challenges of competing in a league where the closest school is 800 miles away?
A: “People talk about the regional rivalries and all of that. From a non-conference standpoint, we have another series coming up with Pitt in football. We’ve played Virginia Tech. We’ve played Maryland. We have Penn State on our schedule. I think you can continue to have those types of non-conference games. Everybody wants to talk about not having a close rivalry and being 800 miles away. Well, let’s look at Pitt. What’s close to Pitt? You have Syracuse. You may have Boston College. Hell, they’re going to Miami and Florida State. Because we may be the team sitting the farthest east in the Big 12, people want to talk about that. ... It may be a little bit more difficult for our fans to travel and get to the away games, but we do have a lot of alumni who live in those areas who do enjoy the Big 12 competitions in the Texas area and the Midwest of Kansas, Iowa and Oklahoma.”
Q: How much of a commitment on West Virginia’s end is there to play the Backyard Brawl beyond 2032?
A: “From my seat right now, I think there’s a huge commitment there. I hope there’s the same from Heather [Lyke’s] seat. It means a lot. You’re 60 or 70 miles apart and you’ve played the game so many times. Just because we’re not in the same conference doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t have competitions. It’s good for college football to have the non-conference competitions like the Pitts, the Penn States, the Marylands, the Virginia Techs.”
Q: What are your biggest goals moving forward? What excites you the most about the future of West Virginia athletics?
A: “It’s building programs where you can have the student-athlete experience and have the right culture. Winning makes a lot of ailments go away. It has been a hard couple of years with COVID and not having fans and the financial impact that COVID has caused among many, many athletic departments across the country in the last several years. What I want to see is us continue to vie for Big 12 championships, as well as national championships. I ask the question to our staff all the time — why not us? Why not West Virginia? We’ve played in Final Fours in basketball. We’ve had chances to compete for national championships in football and other sports. How can we continue to build that as a program? A lot of people want to look at the state of West Virginia and give a lot of reasons of why not, but I flip that and say, ‘Why can’t we?’ We’ve been there before. How we get there and how we sustain that is what I’m trying to build as an athletic director.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published May 29, 2022, 5:00am
NEWSLETTERS
1
Q&A: West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons on Bob Huggins, Neal Brown, NIL and the state of Mountaineer athletics
CRAIG MEYER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
cmeyer@post-gazette.com
MAY 29, 2022
5:00 AM
On Friday, the Post-Gazette spoke with West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons about the state of the Mountaineers’ major-revenue programs, the university’s athletic department as a whole, its role in the Big 12 and larger issues within college athletics.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’ve been at WVU seven years now. How do you think the athletic department has changed in your time there? What do you look at as your biggest accomplishments and biggest regrets?
A: “Humbly, I think the biggest thing that was one of my focuses when I came here as athletic director was the upgrades on a lot of our facilities. We had some new buildings and facilities and we’ve done a lot of renovations to our current facilities. That was a primary focus of mine coming in as athletic director. Needless to say, I’m very proud of what the staff has done in regards to the upgraded facilities. It has impacted each and every one of our sports. We’ve done a lot of things that have impacted our revenue sports of football and basketball, but we also just completed an athletic performance center renovation that impacts all of our Olympic sports.”
Q: Over the past year in men’s college basketball, we’ve seen some of the elder statesmen of the sport — Roy Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, even Jay Wright — retire. You have a coach at West Virginia in Bob Huggins who’s going to be 69 when next season starts. Based on your conversations with Bob, how much longer do you think he wants to go?
A: “Those are discussions that are ongoing. We didn’t perform that well on the court last year. We have a new team coming in. We really haven’t sat down and said, ‘Here’s the drop-dead date. Here’s when it’s done.’ It’s just a matter of from a personal preference and from a professional standpoint, when do you feel that’s right? The outcomes of the games and what that means is something that’s important to all of us. It’s important to Bob competitively, most of all. As long as he’s continuing to enjoy what he’s doing and we have the results that he expects as a head coach, I can see him doing this for several more years. Bob’s still young at heart and still feels he has the energy and passion to do what he’s doing as a head basketball coach. Obviously, we all know the landscape of college athletics is changing quickly and completely different from what we had five years ago, 10 years ago, especially 20 years ago. You see some of these coaches who have stepped down. It was time for them to get out because the game and the college scene is changing. That discussion has not been had with Bob. He knows it’s changing. He has to adapt. He’s a Hall of Fame coach. As long as he has the energy and the passion and we continue to perform at a high level on the basketball court, there’s not a drop-dead date.”
Q: Neal Brown is three years into his tenure and has gone 17-18 in that time. How would you assess the job he has done and what would you attribute some of his early struggles to?
A: “Overall, we would all like to be competitively better and be above the .500 mark and even better than that as we continue moving on. Coaches are evaluated on wins and losses, but I think there’s a bigger picture as an athletic director that you have to look at. The world we live in today, people want instantaneous results and that doesn’t always happen. There have been roster issues and management Neal has had to deal with. He dealt with COVID his first couple of years. Those are things a lot of coaches don’t have to deal with coming in. It’s more than the wins and losses. Would you like to see more wins? Absolutely, not only for myself as athletic director, but from him as a coach. That hasn’t happened, but at the same time, you evaluate other aspects of the staff and the program as a whole. Our recruiting is getting a lot better. We were a very young team. We lost some transfers. There’s sometimes addition by subtraction as you go through that. The culture I believe is the highest it has been in his three years from a team perspective. There’s a lot of positives. The trajectory, I think, is on the upward swing. We just need the wins to come. Are any of us happy with last year’s results and where we’re at? The answer is probably not. We want better results. I think we’re building the team and it takes time to build it. Sometimes your fanbase and others from the outside don’t understand that patience, but being in this business for a number of years, I do understand it. The evaluation aspect is bigger than just the first three years and the record. It’s where this program is headed in the future. And I think it’s a bright future.”
Q: What has the impact been of the confluence of new name, image and likeness rules and the one-time transfer rule? Do you think the landscape it has created is tenable?
A: “No one has that crystal ball to really say, ‘This is what it’s going to look like.’ If you look back almost a year now, I don’t think people anticipated that we would be in the spot we’re in today with collectives and different issues we’re dealing with. This thing continues to evolve. As an association as a whole, we have to continue to adapt and adjust along the way, especially when something that is new. I’m 100% supportive of name, image and likeness. I think there’s a lot of good there for our student-athletes. Unfortunately, at the same time, there’s a lot of bad. I think the board of the NCAA tried to make some adjustments a couple of weeks ago with their outcome of saying it shouldn’t be used in offers and inducements and different things we’re seeing around the country. But you want to give the student-athlete the opportunity to use his or her name in the right way and be able to capitalize off of that. To say we’re going to put the genie back in the bottle and we’re not going to have name, image and likeness, I think that genie is out of the bottle. You’re not going to get it back in.”
Q: West Virginia already has its own collective and is positioned to compete in this space. It’s also one of the smallest states in the country. Based on various economic metrics, it’s one of the poorest states in the country and there aren’t a lot of major corporations in the state. Do you think West Virginia is at any kind of disadvantage at all in the NIL era?
A: “I don’t. Everybody can make excuses, but we have advantages. We have 1.8 million people in this state that are very passionate about West Virginia athletics. We may be a small state, but there are a lot of people behind West Virginia without any pro teams and other Power Five institutions within the state. We compete at the highest levels and I don’t expect name, image and likeness to be anything different. ... The media wants to report on the huge, huge deals, but that’s not the reality. That may be 1% of the student-athletes in college sports that get six- or seven-figure deals. I don’t see a lot of Fortune 500 companies jumping into that, so that’s not impacting us because we don’t have Fortune 500 companies here. If you really look at it, it’s corporations and it’s individuals that are considered boosters that have supported your program in the past.
Q: It will change with the addition of schools like Cincinnati to the Big 12, but what have been the challenges of competing in a league where the closest school is 800 miles away?
A: “People talk about the regional rivalries and all of that. From a non-conference standpoint, we have another series coming up with Pitt in football. We’ve played Virginia Tech. We’ve played Maryland. We have Penn State on our schedule. I think you can continue to have those types of non-conference games. Everybody wants to talk about not having a close rivalry and being 800 miles away. Well, let’s look at Pitt. What’s close to Pitt? You have Syracuse. You may have Boston College. Hell, they’re going to Miami and Florida State. Because we may be the team sitting the farthest east in the Big 12, people want to talk about that. ... It may be a little bit more difficult for our fans to travel and get to the away games, but we do have a lot of alumni who live in those areas who do enjoy the Big 12 competitions in the Texas area and the Midwest of Kansas, Iowa and Oklahoma.”
Q: How much of a commitment on West Virginia’s end is there to play the Backyard Brawl beyond 2032?
A: “From my seat right now, I think there’s a huge commitment there. I hope there’s the same from Heather [Lyke’s] seat. It means a lot. You’re 60 or 70 miles apart and you’ve played the game so many times. Just because we’re not in the same conference doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t have competitions. It’s good for college football to have the non-conference competitions like the Pitts, the Penn States, the Marylands, the Virginia Techs.”
Q: What are your biggest goals moving forward? What excites you the most about the future of West Virginia athletics?
A: “It’s building programs where you can have the student-athlete experience and have the right culture. Winning makes a lot of ailments go away. It has been a hard couple of years with COVID and not having fans and the financial impact that COVID has caused among many, many athletic departments across the country in the last several years. What I want to see is us continue to vie for Big 12 championships, as well as national championships. I ask the question to our staff all the time — why not us? Why not West Virginia? We’ve played in Final Fours in basketball. We’ve had chances to compete for national championships in football and other sports. How can we continue to build that as a program? A lot of people want to look at the state of West Virginia and give a lot of reasons of why not, but I flip that and say, ‘Why can’t we?’ We’ve been there before. How we get there and how we sustain that is what I’m trying to build as an athletic director.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published May 29, 2022, 5:00am
