Baker

MORGANTOWN — If, over the next few days, you happen to run into West Virginia Athletic Director Wren Baker downtown or at dinner, go ahead up and introduce yourself and shake hands.

But a word of caution. After shaking hands, you might want to count your fingers because this is one slick dude.

Think of it this way. In the middle of all kinds of turmoil, being snubbed by the NCAA Tournament, losing a popular and promising first-year coach in Darian DeVries to Indiana, Baker’s negotiating skills pulled this off:

DeVries coached his team for a full year, beat the No. 2 and 3 teams in the country, took a team with no returning players and went 10-10 in the Big 12 and won 19 games. For that, WVU paid him approximately $2.8 million.

With DeVries leaving after just one year on a five-year contract, the buyout that Wren Baker had inserted into the contract left Baker owing 37.5% of the four remaining years. That figures out, with the expenses it took for WVU to hire him also added in since he left so quickly, to a bit over $6 million.

Now I’m not good at math and I’m really bad with money but the way I see that working out is that WVU had a successful season in rebuilding its program, made national headlines with big upsets, certainly getting its money’s worth out of him.

And then, for him jumping ship, rather hastily, one might add, it will be paid that $6 million buyout by Indiana, so they have a great year of basketball AND $6 million in the bank, a $3 million profit.

Not as bad as it looked when it was announced that DeVries was jumping to Indiana.

Baker laughed when it was mentioned that he ought to get patient on the negotiating process he put together for that one.

“I think for consistency where the real money is in the long term is building a ticket base and stability,” Baker said. “But the $6 million help us make a transition to a new coach and help us with some other items in there.

“But I’d rather have a coach who has built sustained success that people are getting endeared to and feeling good about,” he went on. “See, I don’t want the driving force for anyone to be here to be that they feel trapped here by a buyout. You want people who want to be here.

“But, when you hire someone, you want to invest in them and put a lot of guarantees on the table so you want to see you are compensated if you lose them, especially in a short period of time. In this case, at least we do get some money coming our way and that will help us support our program.”

See, Baker and WVU are playing on short cash. True, their athletic budget is a once unheard of height of more than $100 million, but it’s a new world with growing super-conferences and is dominated by the SEC and the Big Ten.

It also is a blind alley that Baker and others throughout college sports are heading down.

“The changes in college athletics overall are a big weight. I know this search will be concluded in a few days. We’ll hire a coach, we’ll bring him here and introduce him and he’ll start to rally support and build the fan base for next year,” Baker said.

“The unknowns of the court settlement, revenue share and how that will work out, how NIL will look in the future … all that is much bigger than hiring a coach because there is no end,” he continued. “You’re always thinking about those things and wondering how you can arrive at a system to navigate them when you don’t know what the end point of your destination is.”

The result is a financial gap between the SEC and Big 12 and the Big 12 and ACC that makes it difficult to go from point A to point B with any confidence. You see players leave, coaches leave, athletic directors leave.

“There’s definitely a financial gap,” Baker agreed. “If you take the average budget of the SEC or Big Ten schools and compare them to the Big 12 and ACC there’s a delta that’s in average. I’ve said this before. You look at our budget and compare it to Kentucky’s, there’s probably a difference of $40 or $50 million that’s made by the distribution from the SEC.

“That’s a gap that’s growing. You have a lot of concern from the outside world about consolidation among power conferences. Do I think that’s a factor? Yeah, it’s probably a factor. When you don’t know the end date of where all this is going to end, revenue sharing and NIL, it’s tough.”

But there is no certainty in anything now and Baker’s job is to see that WVU remains among the haves, not the have nots.

“I wish I knew the end game for conference realignment,” he said. “Then I would be engineering an exact path to make sure we were in it, right? I just think with athletics, your best predictor is to look back at the past and we’ve seen consolidation of conferences; we’ve seen consolidation of brands in the conferences getting larger with more brands being planted in more time zones and in more areas.

“One of the things that’s really on my mind is we have a really strong brand, we have strong viewership, we have strong evaluations, whether it be for licensing revenue, brand awareness, TV revenue to football and basketball.

“But one of the things that drives that is competitiveness, so the best way you can position yourself for the future in whatever is going to happen in the future is to be successful today. So we are always thinking about that and focused on it and trying to be prepared for whatever is around the corner.

“I can’t predict what that is going to be but we will make sure West Virginia is in the middle of it.”