As an OSU alum, I did not know how you all would like being in the Big 12 but I have enjoyed it and it seems like some of you all have also. It just feels natural to me now.
MORGANTOWN, W. VA. — Engineering major Nathan Cole came bounding up the steps of the Mountainlair, the West Virginia University student union, wearing a T-shirt that still seems a little out of place here in the Allegheny Mountains.
BEAT KU.
And he didn't mean Kentucky, even though Lexington, Ky., is 570 miles closer to Morgantown than is Lawrence, Kan., and which goes by UK anyway.
The shirt was startling, even for someone who didn't grow up with West Virginia competing in the Big East and the old ECAC, against schools on the eastern side of the Cumberland Gap.
Welcome to an alternative universe for the Mountaineers. Five years ago, WVU stepped out in faith and left behind all it had known athletically. The Mountaineers, with an Eastern heritage, joined the Big 12, a league comprised of schools in the American Southwest and Heartland.
And for five years, the biggest sporting events on campus have been football games against Oklahoma and Texas or hoop games against Kansas and Iowa State. And people in this gorgeous state are getting accustomed to a Big 12 existence.
“Really, the last two seasons have become the new normal,” said 1975 WVU graduate John Ginola of Charleston, the capital city which sits 156 miles south of Morgantown.
West Virginians seem to be taking to the new normal. WVU's athletic historian, John Antonik, said that early in the Mountaineer/Big 12 marriage, if you walked into a bar on a Saturday, the Pitt or Miami game might be on. But now, those televisions are tuned to Big 12 games.
“It's starting to take hold,” Antonik said. Fans now “know Oklahoma's players. They know Oklahoma State's players.” Antonik once knew Pitt's roster up and down. Now, he said, “I'd be hard-pressed to name five players on Pitt's team.”
Oh, there are things West Virginias miss. The annual rivalries with Penn State and Pitt and Virginia Tech. The Big East basketball tournament in New York's Madison Square Garden. Drivable road games to Louisville and Cincinnati and Rutgers.
“I'd have to say it's been a big adjustment,” said 60-year-old Jay Redmond, a Morgantown business owner. “A total change from what we were used to. But I think we're slowly getting more and more comfortable with it as time goes on.”
The geography is a bummer. But as Ginola said, you have to give up something to get something. The Mountaineers traded convenience for security, and that's a trade West Virginia would make every time.
“The benefit for West Virginia has been enormous,” said school President Gordon Gee. “I'm grateful that West Virginia is in the Big 12.”
Six years ago, the Big East was disintegrating. Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech had long since left for the Atlantic Coast Conference. In autumn 2011, Syracuse and Pitt announced they would do the same. West Virginia needed a solid home and knew the SEC and ACC weren't options, for various reasons.
That's why Oliver Luck, then WVU's athletic director, is held in high esteem for his efforts to get the Mountaineers into the Big 12. The Big 12 lost Texas A&M and Missouri in September 2011; TCU quickly was named to replace A&M, but the Mizzou void came down to a debate between West Virginia and Louisville. Now most everybody admits the Big 12 should have taken both schools, but the Big 12 wanted just one. The Big 12, via the advice of television networks and Luck's politicking, chose the Mountaineers.
“Everyone was worried,” said Ginola, the Charleston booster. “That's why everyone is indebted to Oliver. He had the persistence to make sure we landed in a Power 5 conference.”
And West Virginians have made the most of it, even if the closest Big 12 brother is in Ames, Iowa, 862 miles away.
West Virginia is a state with different cultures. Charleston and below is Southern culture. But the eastern panhandle stretches virtually to the Baltimore-Washington metro area and is closely aligned with the Eastern Seaboard. Northern West Virginia is culturally like Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Few things unite all West Virginians. But state pride and the Mountaineers are among them, and those passions often combine.
“We are it,” said WVU basketball coach Bob Huggins, who was born in Morgantown and came back for college after moving to Ohio. “Everybody's walking down the street with a West Virginia hat on. Signs about the Mountaineers. People are very, very proud of this university. The most powerful man in the state isn't the governor, it's Jerry West. There's that kind of passion for sports. We're the pro team.”
And West Virginians are not pleased with their treatment by the ACC, the conference that best fits them geographically. In 1953, West Virginia was in the 17-member Southern Conference. But seven schools broke away to form the ACC — Maryland, North Carolina, Duke, South Carolina, Clemson, North Carolina State and Wake Forest. West Virginia, which sought to play big-time football along with the likes of Clemson and Maryland, was not invited along.
Over the years, WVU was given reasons like bad roads and inadequate academics for ACC exclusion. Indeed, in the 1950s, traveling through the mountains of West Virginia was not easy. An old line from those days says, quite truthfully, it was easier from Morgantown to get to Canada than to Bluefield in southern West Virginia.
But the academic excuse still gets Huggins' blood boiling.
“We've had 25 Rhodes scholars,” Huggins said. “This has been a great university. We knock it out of the park. Engineering ... great medical school, cancer center. They use that (excuse) to get teams into a league or keep teams out.”
And that's another reason for West Virginians' affinity for the Big 12. The Mountaineers feel wanted, which has not always been their history. Multiple people on campus recited the line of a Providence coach who famously said he didn't get in the Big East to make trips to Morgantown, West Virginia.
“That's why it's good for us,” said Antonik. “Culturally, we match. We didn't match culturally in the Big East. We were a camping trip. There was an undercurrent of elitism.”
Maybe it's not apparent how this campus town of hills and curves and the Monongahela River is anything like Stillwater or Lubbock or Ames.
But West Virginia came from a league that was identified with Georgetown and St. John's and Villanova, and before they left, Miami and Boston College. Urban. Coastal. Mostly private. Now WVU is in a conference of mostly land-grant schools in college towns.
“We're blue-collar schools, we are based in energy states, we're proud,” said Gee, the university president. “Oklahomans love Oklahoma. If you find yourself working in Singapore, you're still an Oklahoman. West Virginians have a love affair with this state.”
Gee was president of WVU from 1981-85, then left for the University of Colorado. “One of the shocking things for me ... the intensity with the relationship between the university and the state just did not exist” in Colorado. “That sets us apart in many ways.”
It exists in Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas.
Ben Murray, WVU's chief athletic fundraiser, grew up in Elkhart, Kan., and graduated from KU. He says there's a “common personality trait” among West Virginians and people in the mainland Big 12 states. “Knowing Midwest values, how people treat you, that's why we like it,” Murray said. “In the Big East, we didn't have a lot in common with Rutgers or Seton Hall. We're a rural-based school.”
So West Virginians might not like the geography, but they like the sociology, of their new conference home. And that's what the Big 12 is starting to feel like.
Home.
MORGANTOWN, W. VA. — Engineering major Nathan Cole came bounding up the steps of the Mountainlair, the West Virginia University student union, wearing a T-shirt that still seems a little out of place here in the Allegheny Mountains.
BEAT KU.
And he didn't mean Kentucky, even though Lexington, Ky., is 570 miles closer to Morgantown than is Lawrence, Kan., and which goes by UK anyway.
The shirt was startling, even for someone who didn't grow up with West Virginia competing in the Big East and the old ECAC, against schools on the eastern side of the Cumberland Gap.
Welcome to an alternative universe for the Mountaineers. Five years ago, WVU stepped out in faith and left behind all it had known athletically. The Mountaineers, with an Eastern heritage, joined the Big 12, a league comprised of schools in the American Southwest and Heartland.
And for five years, the biggest sporting events on campus have been football games against Oklahoma and Texas or hoop games against Kansas and Iowa State. And people in this gorgeous state are getting accustomed to a Big 12 existence.
“Really, the last two seasons have become the new normal,” said 1975 WVU graduate John Ginola of Charleston, the capital city which sits 156 miles south of Morgantown.
West Virginians seem to be taking to the new normal. WVU's athletic historian, John Antonik, said that early in the Mountaineer/Big 12 marriage, if you walked into a bar on a Saturday, the Pitt or Miami game might be on. But now, those televisions are tuned to Big 12 games.
“It's starting to take hold,” Antonik said. Fans now “know Oklahoma's players. They know Oklahoma State's players.” Antonik once knew Pitt's roster up and down. Now, he said, “I'd be hard-pressed to name five players on Pitt's team.”
Oh, there are things West Virginias miss. The annual rivalries with Penn State and Pitt and Virginia Tech. The Big East basketball tournament in New York's Madison Square Garden. Drivable road games to Louisville and Cincinnati and Rutgers.
“I'd have to say it's been a big adjustment,” said 60-year-old Jay Redmond, a Morgantown business owner. “A total change from what we were used to. But I think we're slowly getting more and more comfortable with it as time goes on.”
The geography is a bummer. But as Ginola said, you have to give up something to get something. The Mountaineers traded convenience for security, and that's a trade West Virginia would make every time.
“The benefit for West Virginia has been enormous,” said school President Gordon Gee. “I'm grateful that West Virginia is in the Big 12.”
Six years ago, the Big East was disintegrating. Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech had long since left for the Atlantic Coast Conference. In autumn 2011, Syracuse and Pitt announced they would do the same. West Virginia needed a solid home and knew the SEC and ACC weren't options, for various reasons.
That's why Oliver Luck, then WVU's athletic director, is held in high esteem for his efforts to get the Mountaineers into the Big 12. The Big 12 lost Texas A&M and Missouri in September 2011; TCU quickly was named to replace A&M, but the Mizzou void came down to a debate between West Virginia and Louisville. Now most everybody admits the Big 12 should have taken both schools, but the Big 12 wanted just one. The Big 12, via the advice of television networks and Luck's politicking, chose the Mountaineers.
“Everyone was worried,” said Ginola, the Charleston booster. “That's why everyone is indebted to Oliver. He had the persistence to make sure we landed in a Power 5 conference.”
And West Virginians have made the most of it, even if the closest Big 12 brother is in Ames, Iowa, 862 miles away.
West Virginia is a state with different cultures. Charleston and below is Southern culture. But the eastern panhandle stretches virtually to the Baltimore-Washington metro area and is closely aligned with the Eastern Seaboard. Northern West Virginia is culturally like Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Few things unite all West Virginians. But state pride and the Mountaineers are among them, and those passions often combine.
“We are it,” said WVU basketball coach Bob Huggins, who was born in Morgantown and came back for college after moving to Ohio. “Everybody's walking down the street with a West Virginia hat on. Signs about the Mountaineers. People are very, very proud of this university. The most powerful man in the state isn't the governor, it's Jerry West. There's that kind of passion for sports. We're the pro team.”
And West Virginians are not pleased with their treatment by the ACC, the conference that best fits them geographically. In 1953, West Virginia was in the 17-member Southern Conference. But seven schools broke away to form the ACC — Maryland, North Carolina, Duke, South Carolina, Clemson, North Carolina State and Wake Forest. West Virginia, which sought to play big-time football along with the likes of Clemson and Maryland, was not invited along.
Over the years, WVU was given reasons like bad roads and inadequate academics for ACC exclusion. Indeed, in the 1950s, traveling through the mountains of West Virginia was not easy. An old line from those days says, quite truthfully, it was easier from Morgantown to get to Canada than to Bluefield in southern West Virginia.
But the academic excuse still gets Huggins' blood boiling.
“We've had 25 Rhodes scholars,” Huggins said. “This has been a great university. We knock it out of the park. Engineering ... great medical school, cancer center. They use that (excuse) to get teams into a league or keep teams out.”
And that's another reason for West Virginians' affinity for the Big 12. The Mountaineers feel wanted, which has not always been their history. Multiple people on campus recited the line of a Providence coach who famously said he didn't get in the Big East to make trips to Morgantown, West Virginia.
“That's why it's good for us,” said Antonik. “Culturally, we match. We didn't match culturally in the Big East. We were a camping trip. There was an undercurrent of elitism.”
Maybe it's not apparent how this campus town of hills and curves and the Monongahela River is anything like Stillwater or Lubbock or Ames.
But West Virginia came from a league that was identified with Georgetown and St. John's and Villanova, and before they left, Miami and Boston College. Urban. Coastal. Mostly private. Now WVU is in a conference of mostly land-grant schools in college towns.
“We're blue-collar schools, we are based in energy states, we're proud,” said Gee, the university president. “Oklahomans love Oklahoma. If you find yourself working in Singapore, you're still an Oklahoman. West Virginians have a love affair with this state.”
Gee was president of WVU from 1981-85, then left for the University of Colorado. “One of the shocking things for me ... the intensity with the relationship between the university and the state just did not exist” in Colorado. “That sets us apart in many ways.”
It exists in Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas.
Ben Murray, WVU's chief athletic fundraiser, grew up in Elkhart, Kan., and graduated from KU. He says there's a “common personality trait” among West Virginians and people in the mainland Big 12 states. “Knowing Midwest values, how people treat you, that's why we like it,” Murray said. “In the Big East, we didn't have a lot in common with Rutgers or Seton Hall. We're a rural-based school.”
So West Virginians might not like the geography, but they like the sociology, of their new conference home. And that's what the Big 12 is starting to feel like.
Home.
