Sure, the university is a member of the Big 12, one of the top five largest and wealthiest conferences, but West Virginia University also is a school that second-tier student-athletes choose because the blue-chippers take a lot of top slots with the more competitive football and basketball programs.
That’s right. WVU may be in a Power 5 conference, but it’s not truly a Power 5 school.
But when a Mountaineer exceeds expectations in Morgantown? Transfer. Portal. And what does the athlete have to lose? The student-athlete moves up without the loss of a season, and if their success continues, they play, get seen and drafted, and likely, get the payday they’ve dreamed about since catching that first schoolyard touchdown.
And yes, it sure does go both ways, but unless the portal transaction is similar to a Joe Burrow-to-LSU transfer, it likely won’t have the same sort of impact inside Milan Puskar Stadium as it did when the Tigers – and Burrow – won the national title in 2019 with a 15-0 record after throwing only 39 passes in three seasons for the Buckeyes.
Hey, we love our Mountaineers, right? And every once in a great while our coach (most recently Don Nehlen and Rich Rodriguez) has gathered something great that made us all proud. But with this transfer portal in place, will Neal Brown and Bob Huggins ever have the chance to accomplish the same?
Not when it appears the transfer portal is a one-way ride straight out of Morgantown time and time again.
I believe its actually the transfer portal in combination of the NIL money pouring in. Like the NFL, players are going to go where they can play and at the same time have financial resources to take care of themselves and their family. As we are seeing now, with a few college players earning less as an NFL rookie than in college, its going to be difficult to keep athletes at WVU unless they are receiving more than what is offered to other schools. Unless WVU’s boosters can raise the kinds of money that other schools have, getting and keeping the top athletes is going to become very difficult. Also, a long term problem is going to be that as boosters put more and more money into athletes, who is going to provide donations for facilities. It is my hope that facility construction and maintenance does not fall on the state (ie: taxpayers).
My long term guess is that college athletics will become a system like the “major league” and minor leagues with some schools being the Yankees and Dodgers and others becoming the Mud Hens, Curve, etc.