Baker

MORGANTOWN — It was a vacation well earned by Wren Baker, the West Virginia athletic director whose last year has been spent in courtrooms and meeting rooms, to say nothing of locker rooms, as he was doing his part to reshape the widely changed world of college athletics.

It wasn’t at all what he signed up for, but it was what was on the table and the last couple of years had been unexpected havoc from dawn to dusk as coaches came and went, players came and went and lawsuits were filed and settled. Now, he was looking for a break, so he and his wife, Heather, headed for Nantucket and a vacation unlike any they had ever had.

“We’d never been on a northern vacation or to an eastern seaboard beach, so we had a great time. The girls were in camp, so it was just Heather and I. Best food I’ve ever had over the course of a trip like that. Every meal was incredible,” he said.

“Lobster, blue crab, scallops, anything you can dream of.”

But now he was back and starting to settle back in, doing a media check to talk about the House settlement and revenue sharing and the future of college athletics. Whether he, or you or I, liked the new worlds of college athletics doesn’t matter, for that’s the way it is and the changes, he believes, were necessary.

“The last couple of years it has felt like when I get in my car to head out somewhere and I’m leaving the driveway and my wife is driving and she says ‘Which way do I go?’ and I don’t know what to tell her because I don’t know where we’re going. That’s what the last two or three years of college athletics has felt like,” Baker said.

The only thing certain about running athletics was the uncertainty as conferences realigned, the transfer portal dominated, lawsuits remained unsettled and there was no roadmap to follow.

“With the House settlement, having some semblance of a system is going to be very helpful,” Baker said. “It’s not going to solve all of our problems, but what we’ve had the last two or three years where we’ve had unregulated and unrestrictive free agency at all times was not sustainable.

“There’s dozens of Big Ten and SEC schools where the budgets are two times what ours are, and have $30 million deficits,” Baker went on. “People say, ‘We’ll let the market decide.’ But there’s not a market because there’s no ownership. It’s this large bureaucratic organization that gets very heavily — and sometimes unduly — influenced by outside forces.”

That’s such as donors or courts or agents.

“That’s why Ohio State can win a national championship in football with a $230 million budget and have a nearly $40 million dollar deficit,” Baker said. “That’s missed by a lot of people but my hope is we can establish some kind of system that works.”

It was taking a toll on West Virginia. Baker has had four men’s basketball coaches the last four years. He had to hire a football coach in Rich Rodriguez who had left on bad terms previously and maybe a third of his fans felt it was wrong to bring back.

The basketball roster was in a state of total turmoil and the football roster with Rodriguez may have more than 70 new players this year.

It was a large burden on some of college sports’ greatest and longest suffering fans, who have had many great moments but who have no national championships in football or basketball and, with the new rules, who knew what their place in the new pecking order was?

Do the new rules give West Virginia more or less of a chance to win a title, Baker was asked.

“I talk to my kids about this all the time,” he began. “You can’t let the things you don’t have keep you from seeing the things you do have. We have had tremendous successes across a lot of sports, even this year where we were national runner-up in cross country, won a national championship in rifle, last year in the College Cup of men’s soccer and a few years ago we were national runners-up in women’s soccer.

“In our program, there’s a lot of success that’s being had, there’s exciting things that are going on with our programs, but I recognize that winning a national championship in football or men’s basketball is kind of the dream for all sports,” Baker went on.

“That’s something we talk about. You start trying to compete for conference championships, that gets you on your way.”

But the big money schools in the SEC and Big Ten conferences have been on top, and to many it appears that the new collegiate structure exaggerates that.

Or does it?

“I do think we can compete and excel and thrive in this new world,” Baker said. “Is it going to be easy? No. Are we going to have to be better aligned in pulling the rope in the same direction more so than our other peers who have more residents in their states, more revenue, more corporate presence? Yeah, we are going to have to do that.

“But what we do have is the vast majority of people who are from this state or live in this state or went to school at WVU are passionate about the Mountaineers and we have to take advantage of that.”

The fans are going to have to adjust along with the programs.

“One thing I would tell our fans is that’s something everybody is doing now,” Baker said. “That’s not unique to WVU. Everyone is dealing with high roster turnover and more transient rosters. We actually were very unique at WVU in having some coaches with very lengthy tenures.

“That’s unusual in this day and age to have coaches for 10 or 15 or 20 years,” he said, speaking of the Don Nehlens, Gale Catletts, Bob Huggins. “I think it’s incumbent on us at the institution to recruit people who will embrace West Virginia and the values that our people hold in high esteem.

“I think it’s incumbent on us to tell our people that story because we don’t have three or four years to connect with a player like we used to, so we probably have to do a better job of connecting people quicker, so they get a chance to learn about the individuals who are on our teams.”

The vacation’s over. Come football season and beyond, it’s a whole new menu.