Baker striving early in tenure as WVU AD
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MORGANTOWN -- No one would think any less of West Virginia's Wren Baker if last night, over a glass of wine with his wife, he leaned back and looked at her and said, "What have we gotten into here?"
Baker, of course, is the new athletic director at West Virginia, coming in from North Texas to run an athletic department in a Power 5 conference with a $90 million athletic budget and, with the eyes of the nation peering upon him through the aperture of the unblinking camera that is the national media.
He came to transition the school into the era of transfer portals and NIL, to build upon an athletic history of 150 years that carried the pride of West Virginians through tough times around them. He came with a vision of how to magnify the pride one of America's greatest and most adoring fan bases possesses.
West Virginia's athletics was at a key moment. When the team's historian John Antonik is old and sitting there in his man cave listening to classic albums from Gordon Lightfoot or the Temptations, taking a break from writing the ultimate history book on the school's teams and athletes, he will feature what the next few years bring.
You have the new AD, a new Big 12 Conference, one that is going coast-to-coast and thinking seriously about changing its name and adding more members from the wild west.
You have a changing definition of what a college athlete is, where some of the athletes are earning more than their professors through NIL, where they live a here-today, gone-tomorrow existence in a transfer portal that was nothing but an athlete's dream five years ago.
And then, at a time when he was involved in his first money-raising coaches caravan across the state, a time of rubbing elbows with big donors, booze and schmooze, his world was torched by the Bob Huggins incident on a radio station in Cincinnati.
All of a sudden he found himself up to his nick in a public relations nightmare that had to be addressed immediately, for in the middle was a bigger-than-life Mountaineer, a Hall of Fame coach who had become the state's biggest athletic attraction of the moment and then uttered a degrading slur that went national.
No, you wouldn't blame Wren Baker for being stunned by what had happened.
It had been tough enough with the defection of his women's basketball coach, which led to a search for a new one, an unexpected problem that while not of the significance of the Huggins situation, one that required swift action, too.
See, as he is judging Neal Brown as he tries to keep his job as football coach, the public is looking curiously at him and his reactions to situations.
It's nice to say that he has smoothly moved through the first few weeks/months filled fittingly for Morgantown with deep potholes without blowing out a tire.
While the Huggins matter required the attention of everyone at the school from the Board of Governors and the President on down, Baker made himself a part of it all.
We can't, of course, can't know what went on behind the scenes but we know there was serious negotiations involved. No one wanted Huggins to lose his job, but what the 41-year veteran coach had done was unthinkable, if not unspeakable. It had to be a major penalty, yet keep the basketball program on track for what has ignited the fan base.
The group that discussed the matter as it moved toward a conclusion was in agreement that some suspension was necessary, but how long was a contentious issue. There also was the public relations aspect of turning bad into good by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, reducing Huggins' salary by a million dollars and marking it for the groups that have taken over leadership in the gay community.
Baker and the management group were sensitive to seeing that the basketball players themselves, or the fans, were not damaged because of something they had no part in.
Huggins is reaching the end of a career where he has accomplished much, but never won a national championship and is at a school that is equally void of the crown. It's no secret the 69-year-old Huggins is nearing the end of his coaching career and he has done so much as a coach and human being that it was important to all to allow him to exit as gracefully as possible.
It has been a lot to put on Baker's plate so early in his tenure at West Virginia, but he has come through it not only unbruised but with people offering up passing grades as he watches Randy Mazey's baseball team keep the athletic department in the spotlight as it writes an admirable story.
Baker is off to a good start, but it won't be until they see how he handles the Neal Brown football situation before the public and fan base makes up its mind on if he is really the man to lead the Mountaineers into the future.