West Virginia is Confirmed to the Big 12 and Mountaineer Fans Should Get Psyched for 2,300-Mile Big 12 Road Trips
By Sam Eifling
Maybe the good people of West Virginia (population: 1.8 million, average household income: 49 the of 50 states) will turn out to be unexpected road warriors. Moutaineers fans put up a good show trucking to Baton Rouge to play LSU last year, and to be fair, the Big East has its share of treks; there probably aren’t many W.Va. fans who have been making the cannonball runs to Miami (1,102 road miles, as per Google maps) to crash the U. But in the current Big 12 (minus defectors Missouri and Texas A&M) a West Virginia frosh entering in a couple of years will be looking at an average road trip of 1,152 miles each way to see their Mountaineers play away games, with none of those miles driven down the Atlantic coast of Florida. That’s a 38-hour round-trip, on average, to see a game — and somewhere north of $300, conservatively, for gas. The TV contracts on this arrangement will be sublime, surely, but they’ll have to be. The away-game student section will be just a guy with a W painted on his chest next to a girl with a V on her midriff, in a sea of Jayhawks or Longhorns or Sooners, a 20-odd-hour drive from home. Everyone else will stay put, substituting TV for what used to be called the college experience.
To be mindlessly even-handed about the move, there are a few people in Texas who are geeked for it. This week some enterprising reporters from the Charleston Daily Mail put a shiny face on the upcoming desert wanderings of the Mountaineers with this bit of starry-eyed small-picture piffle, titled “WVU fans in Midwest can now see team up close.” The gist is that if you live in North Texas, where there are all of 1,500 “registered WVU alumni” to help pack Lone Star State stadiums, you’ll finally get to go to games. Sample quote: “[G]roups have 30 to 60 TV game watch parties each year, but those will pale in comparison to seeing it up close and personal.” Takeaway: No alumni in Texas ever, ever get up to Morgantown for games anymore. So how often are students in Morgantown going to get down to Texas?
College road trips are a special breed even among road trips. They’re nostalgia in real time. Students need just enough of a window to attend/skip classes Friday, load up the hatchback that afternoon, floor it, go beer-ponging at the opponents’ frat house that night, wake up late Saturday, gorge on pancakes, get pleasantly lit on hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps before kickoff, watch the game, sing in the end zone, hit the local watering hole again that night and leadfoot it home Sunday to fake their way through a response paper by Monday morning. (You know, college!) Plus, a mobile fan base makes an awesome 12th man. When I attended Northwestern games as an undergrad, Wisconsin was a demonstrably better team. The Badgers would serve us Ron Dayne like a never-ending cheese platter, abetted by an o-line of cornfed earthmovers. Worse, though, were the jolly, liquored-up, red-clad Wisconsin fans dappling the stands like a rash. With Madison just three hours away, they were free to invade, and good on those Rose Bowling bastards for making the drive.
Not every hop needs to be so short for a conference to thrive. The SEC pits Florida and Arkansas against one another from 997 miles apart … but the Gators also have shorter trips to Georgia (348 miles), to Auburn (313 miles) and to South Carolina (354 miles). Poor Washington State, keeping it real on the Idaho border, gets Washington inside a distance (287 miles) you could drive after work on a Friday, but also has to strap in for those annual Tucson trips (1,359 miles). The Big Ten now pits Penn State and Nebraska against each other at a driving distance of 1,090 miles. But these are the conference extremes. West Virginia’s nearest opponent is going to be Iowa State (871 miles) away. ESPN.com’s David Ubben noted that media travel budgets are due to take a hit as well, if reporters and photographers even get to follow teams on these long jaunts. Cable television is demanding this screwball realignment and, appropriately, it will be the only game standing in the aftermath. If the Big 12 does end up spurning West Virginia, the only people who should be crushed live well outside West Virginia.