MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — The problem with having football drive conference realignment is the sport plays the least amount of games and rarely travels on anything other than a weekend.
It is not only the sport that creates a heavy majority of the revenue, but it’s once-a-week Saturday schedule is pretty unique in terms of keeping its athletes in class.
The other 15 sports sponsored by the Big 12 is left to make adjustments based on the hand football has dealt them.
None of this is exactly breaking news, but the Big 12’s landscape will once again be changing vastly once BYU joins in 2023, a year before Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida are expected to join.
Which brings us to this point: The Big 12 schedule makers in the other sports besides football better use some common sense on how and when to schedule this new Big 12.
Using basketball as an example, common sense hasn’t always won out in Big 12 scheduling, or maybe you haven’t heard WVU head coach Bob Huggins’ rants when the Mountaineers are picked to play at Texas Tech for a 9 p.m. start on a random Tuesday night.
That means the Mountaineers don’t get back to Morgantown until 4 a.m., or later, and then the players have to get ready for class just a few hours later … this is when Huggins points out how college athletics are supposed to be about the betterment and welfare of the studen-athlete, while rolling his eyes into the back of his head.
What the Big 12 has to quickly realize is it no longer has just one unique scheduling situation with WVU. Cincinnati and UCF will be basically in the same boat as WVU.
The mileage from Provo, Utah to Dallas is nearly identical as it is from Morgantown to Dallas, except the Cougars (in Mountain Standard Time) will actually gain and hour traveling back home, as opposed to WVU, Cincinnati and UCF, which loses an hour.
And then what will the Big 12 do when it comes time to schedule BYU vs. WVU — separated by two time zones and more than 1,900 miles — in hoops?
When the 2023-24 schedule comes out, if it has WVU traveling to Provo for a 9 p.m. tip on a Wednesday, it may be enough for Huggins to literally flip out.
We asked WVU women’s basketball coach Mike Carey if there have been any preliminary discussions between the school and the Big 12 on scheduling once realignment sets in?
He confirmed there had been none as of yet, but then added this nugget:
“I don’t think they (the Big 12) care,” Carey said.
Well, the Big 12 better care about scheduling, because this thing could get out of hand quickly.
In a few years, when everything is sort of new in the league with Texas and Oklahoma being gone, and you have a brand new horizon to look toward, bad scheduling could turn the whole thing sour very fast, regardless of how the football teams perform.
Carey’s prediction was the Big 12 would go to two divisions in basketball, much like the plan is for football.
Except, division play isn’t exactly a popular thing in college basketball.
Only four of the 32 leagues use divisions currently and none of them are Power Five Conferences.
The last Power Five league to use divisions was the SEC in 2010-11.
Having two divisions in the Big 12 would help cut down on travel, especially if WVU, Cincinnati and UCF are in the same division, which would likely be the case.
The problem with divisions is how to divide the non-division conference games?
Unless the league wants to expand to 22 conference games — it doesn’t — there’s no more round-robin scheduling.
So say you have Baylor and WVU with identical 14-4 conference records, but Baylor played Kansas twice and WVU only played Kansas once, think there won’t be some gripe about how those two teams would be seeded for the Big 12 tournament?
Or say WVU goes two or three years without having to play Oklahoma State in the regular season.
Or say WVU plays Kansas once a season over a three-year period, but all three games are on the road.
What would those odds look like? Well, West Virginia has had one of its own win the Powerball in 2002, but has yet to see the Mountaineers win at Allen Fieldhouse.
And if you think none of those scenarios are possible, just check out WVU’s men’s basketball history with Syracuse in the old Big East.
The most logical thing for Big 12 basketball is one division where everybody plays once with seven home-and-home opponents.
That doesn’t solve all problems in terms of equity of seeding for the conference tourney or even the sites and times for the tricky weeknight games, but it’s a start.
The bottom line is the Big 12 has to realize it’s no longer just a Midwest-based league anymore, which is good, as long as it finds a way to balance scheduling in all sports and not just football.
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