BlueandGoldNews.com West Virginia University should make room on the schedule for more rivalries.

MORGANTOWN — The initial reaction to The Basketball Tournament and Best Virginia’s battle with Marshall on Sunday was that it had a nice little nook in a West Virginian’s summer season that filled the competitive void that comes between the end of spring collegiate sports and the start of football in the fall.

Trips off to beach or the mountains were nice, golf provided us with a reminder that athletic excitement can be found from 6 to 60 in a game where we all have our own personal par to shoot at and that a walk down the rail trail can bring a certain serenity into lives that doesn’t exist in the pressurized world of September through April or May.

The team known as Best Virginia in these parts, basically built upon yesterday’s West Virginia basketball heroes, gave a taste of nostalgia sprinkled with the rush that comes with athletic competition and in these days of costs spiraling wildly out of control, does so at an affordable price.

But as that Best Virginia team beat the Marshall University representative Herd That in a Charleston game that generated the kind of enthusiasm that normally is reserved for the college teams in their own home gymnasiums it carried a message far greater than even this tournament that offers a $1 million winner-take-all prize.

There was a message in there for the Mountaineers that there is a better way to schedule, a way to make football and basketball seasons that offer far too many low-interest games that are devised simply to provide near-certain victories that pave the road to postseason play.

To see the fan — and player– intensity of Best Virginia vs. Herd That and to realize that it produces only a marginal amount of the energy that comes with regionally inspired games is to realize that there is a demand for this in the state’s major sports.

Would it not be best if a way could be worked out to bring West Virginia, Marshall, Maryland, Penn State, Virginia Tech and — of course — Pitt together to ensure that they could create non-conference availabilities toward each other to beef up non-conference play.

West Virginia has three non-conference games in football and to see them waste them on the likes of Robert Morris, Albany, Duquesne, Towson, Long Island and Eastern Kentucky, as they have since 2000, just doesn’t cut it.

Not when you could be mixing in the aforementioned Power Four plus Marshall into a rotating non-conference schedule.

The truth is, you are a Power Four school at West Virginia and should play Power Five schools.

A change in NCAA rules to allow a preseason game against a lower division team would give a coach a chance to work out the kinks against a lesser opponent and should be enacted even if nothing is done about the scheduling choice of most schools now that allows them to buy victories as they now also buy players.

The same thing could be done in basketball, which has more non-conference games to work with. Think it would not be a hit to put together a four-team, two-day preseason tournament where you had WVU, Pitt, Maryland and Virginia Tech on a yearly basis, home court being rotated from one site to another so you would host every four years.

We are living in a changing athletic time and schedules from Power 4 schools should offer all Power 4 opponents, save for certain rivalries such as WVU and Marshall.

With power conferences now national in scope that you may have WVU at BYU or Stanford playing at Duke or Penn State going to play USC, the non-conference games should be competitive regional battles between Power 4 teams.

Just as in baseball you would not stand for the New York Yankees to play the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp of the International League, it may be all right for let its MAC (Mountaineer Athletic Club) raise funds for the school but it should not be all right for the other MAC (Mid-American Conference) Ohio University Bobcats to schedule WVU, even if they have the Mountaineers at home this year.

The fact of the matter is that Ohio is playing the kind of non-conference schedule WVU should be playing, facing the Mountaineers, Ohio State and Rutgers as its first three games this season.

With coaches being paid millions and players being part of revenue sharing $22-million plus while also capitalizing on NIL money, it is not too much to ask them to face a challenge time they take the floor and give their fans, who are paying top dollar for games, something to really be excited about each time they attend a game.

The difference? Last year, WVU played before 62,084 fans at home in the Penn State opener and before 66,087 at Pitt while in between they drew 50,073 at home for Albany.