Morgantown, West Virginia – While there were persistent rumors of West Virginia heading to the ACC Conference for months, West Virginia’s director of athletics Shane Lyons shot down those talks yesterday on the Mountaineer Insider Podcast.
“Conference realignment is a two-way street,” Lyons said. “It’s not just a one-way street where the institution gets to just pick where they want to be in and they make a phone call and you’re into that conference. Right now there is no interest from the ACC to add West Virginia and there have been no talks whatsoever. We’ve been a solid member of the Big 12 Conference and that’s where we intend to stay.”
Boom. Rumors squashed.
Although the ACC would have been a sexier option for the Mountaineers, remaining in the Big 12 has an awful lot of advantages as well.
The New Big 12 Conference will likely be divided into two divisions, the East and the West, with West Virginia joining Cincinnati, UCF, Kansas, Kansas State and Iowa State in the East. The West division will include Texas Tech, BYU, Oklahoma State, Baylor, TCU and Houston.
Not only is this a very solid conference in both football and basketball, it gives West Virginia the opportunity to beat Dana Holgorsen’s Houston Cougars every single year.
Perhaps only surpassed by Rich Rodriguez as West Virginia’s least favorite sports figure, Dana Holgorsen will soon return to Morgantown, the very place he turned his back on in 2018.
Holgorsen is particularly loathed by Mountaineers not only because of his abhorrent behavior while he was the head coach of West Virginia but also because of the way he left Morgantown.
Holgorsen was an absolute embarrassment on the sidelines and certainly was not a model representation of what it means to be a Mountaineer. Holgorsen never embraced West Virginia and despite his adequate success as the head coach of the Mountaineers, West Virginians never really embraced him either.
Holgorsen’s 61-41 record at WVU, including a 10-3 season in 2016, was respectable, but the Mountaineers were 1-5 in bowl games under him and most of his teams underachieved. .
In addition, Holgorsen’s lack of effort and prowess in recruiting left Neal Brown with little talent remaining as he started his tenure with West Virginia.
Of course, Holgorsen said that recruiting athletes to West Virginia was impossible: “We weren’t going to get high school kids at West Virginia that we were going to win the Big 12 with.”
Neal Brown, of course, has proven otherwise. Although West Virginia has not yet won the Big 12, Brown has them on the right track with the program’s best recruiting class ever incoming next season.
When Houston returns to Morgantown in the future, Dana Holgorsen deserves all of the hatred and torment that Mountaineers fans will give to him.
West Virginia will finally have a real in-conference hated rival.
