Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com
WVU athletic director Wren Baker fields questions during a recent press conference.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series on college athletics with West Virginia University athletic director Wren Baker.
MORGANTOWN — It started a month ago today when an editor discovered, while surfing the net, an article on Sportico.com of a proposal from a group called College Sports Tomorrow suggesting a direction for college football’s future that included revenue sharing and all the other “hot topics” of the day.
It was built around a new 80-school super league structure that featured seven permanent divisions built on geography, traditional rivalries and financial equality and one rotating division of lesser schools.
The editor thought it would be “fun” to talk to WVU’s athletic director Wren Baker about this revolutionary look at an approach that had suggested, as impossible as it may be, a starting date of 2027.
From a provincial West Virginia point of view, this was hardly something new as WVU was put into a Northeastern Division that was strongly reminiscent of an Eastern power conference pushed many years ago by Joe Paterno, this newest version having WVU in with Boston College, Notre Dame, Penn State, Pitt, Rutgers, Syracuse, Virginia and Virginia Tech.
And, the interview with Baker that took place on Wednesday afternoon, would really have been “fun” had not so much transpired over the month since the article came out.
The world was abuzz about the endless restructuring of conferences, media coverage, playoffs, NIL distributions, player unionization, etc., that it seemed to put the NCAA’s existence itself in doubt.
This had gone from a conference restructuring into a discussion of the very future of college sports and West Virginia’s place in it.
Where was all this headed, Baker was asked, finding himself in a position he never could have imagined a year and a half ago when he was named to replace Shane Lyons as the man running what now is nearing a $100-millon enterprise known as West Virginia athletics.
What would the face of college athletics look like a decade from now?
“I don’t think anybody can intelligently predict the future of college sports,” Baker began, laying bare just how uncertain the future is. “We’ve seen so much change the last few years. I don’t know that anyone would have predicted that a conference like the Pac-12 would run into the things it ran into.”
The one reality is football rules college sports, with basketball a staple capable of contributing financially to a changing model, but that everything else is up for grabs.
Was this football super league a pipe dream or was it a real possibility? Could West Virginia wind up in a conference in which it belongs to play football and basketball, a conference’s traditional definition being a group of entities drawn together by similar circumstances such as geography, finances, academic standards.
Or have things gone too far afield in such matters as TV contracts, players rights to play where they choose and be paid for doing it and expanding national playoffs in football and basketball?
“We could see a Super League concept,” Baker suggested. “I think if you were starting from scratch today there’s a very good chance you would put it together that way.”
But they are not starting from scratch. This is 2024 and college sports is now where professional sports were 50 years ago with reshaping conference alliances, playoffs, salary structures, free agency.
“I’m not sure a super league restructuring to organize into conferences for all sports makes a lot of sense because what might make sense for football may not make sense in other sports,” Baker went on.
“USC playing Michigan in football, that’s a big draw. You are bringing in multiple time zones, multiple parts of the country, but sending your tennis team from Michigan to USC doesn’t make much sense. But the way this is all constructed now, with contractual agreements being so powerful, I’m not sure there’s a path for that to change.”
Football provides the fuel that runs college athletics … money.
For years they just raked it in without sharing it with players and it was inevitable as free agency was in baseball that the courts eventually would rule the structure of compensation illegal and they now are working on revenue sharing; on whether college football players should be considered independent contractors or employees of the universities, which would allow them to unionize.
All of this is in the courts right now and could change everything you’ve always thought about sports. Remember when professional baseball and football players had to get off-season jobs such as the Pirates’ Richie Hebner digging graves to make ends meet?
Now they become owners of the teams.
If, for example, athletes are termed employees and legally unionize, what is keeping them attached to the teams as students in the schools?
“I think those are all legitimate concerns,” Baker admitted. “I do feel like college athletics is still very much married to being tethered to education. But as the money changes, could that change? It could.
“I think revenue sharing is inevitable. I think it will cause us to have to think differently. First and foremost, we’re funding college sports by and large with the revenue from one sport, with a little bit from basketball.”
Revenue sharing could cost each university’s athletic department $30 million in revenue sent to its athletes.
“When you go into revenue share with student athletes, how do you maintain the funding for all of your Olympic sports, many of which you bring very little to no revenue in and have big expenses?” Baker asked.
“College athletics have been through some paradigm shifts; other industries have had major shifts. The journalism industry has been through some major shifts. We’re not the only industry going through that and the thing I would reassure people about is college sports still means so much to so many people.
“That’s why the viewership is up, it’s why the money continues to go up. Despite how much people are cord-cutting, the viewership of college athletics keeps going up because of the way people are consuming other types of video.
“For example, nobody watches live TV sitcoms anymore. They all watch streaming, where they can binge watch. Sports is the last thing people watch live … maybe sports and election coverage. We’re going to find a way to get through this.
“Is it going to look different? It is. Do I hope we maintain that connection to academia and the campus? I do, but I’m not going to sit here and say I know what the end game is.”