Everything changes and as college football is feeling their version of change, Neal Brown says it could be a good thing.
When the Pac-12 disbanded on Friday with two schools jumping for the Big Ten and three more to the Big 12, the college football landscape changed forever.
“Different doesn’t mean bad,” West Virginia head coach Neal Brown said on Saturday with regard to conference realignment.
Different is surely what the future of college athletics is going to look like. Starting in the 2024-2025 academic year, there figures to be a shift in what college football looks like. West Virginia facing Utah or USC facing Rutgers would be considered a conference game.
“I think sometimes we get used to things,” Brown said. “We get used to watching tv a certain way, we get used to certain rules within college athletics, we get used to conferences and I think just people in general don’t like change. But just because things are different don’t mean they’re necessarily worse.”
Different is exactly what West Virginia has experienced since joining the Big 12. Until this year, the closest school to Morgantown was Iowa State, and the Mountaineers lost rivalry games such as ones recently played against Maryland, Pitt, and Virginia Tech.
Brown grasps what West Virginia football means to the people who support it, and with new opponents, the love surrounding programs like West Virginia is due to the people who support them.
“Now I do think some of the things that make college athletics great is that there’s this connection,” Brown said. “A lot of the people that are coming (to games) are second, third, fourth, generation Mountaineer fans that went to school here or grew up in the area and they really identify with the WVU logo and not necessarily with me as the head coach or any of our players, but they really identify with West Virginia.
“Because West Virginia represents the state, it represents the school that they went to. And I think there’s a lot more of that in college athletics. And it happens in football more so than not because you have homecoming.”
Brown said he recognizes the shift from playing historical regional rivalries, to now having the focus be on playing schools who reside three time zones away.
“There’s certain memories that are attached to those (games). Football are more special events and like I said I go to all the sporting events, I love sports, but you have a lot more games in other (sports). Football games are events.
“They’re events and your memories and everything tied into these events. What happens is a lot of times those events are wrapped around rivalries which I think is really good but now that’s changing.”
Brown is embracing what’s new and is open-minded to how the change could positively affect the future of West Virginia.
“Maybe there’s going to be new rivalries. Maybe there’s going to be different things,” Brown said. “We’re looking at basically four conferences now and they’re spread coast to coast, maybe they’re different, maybe they could be better.”
In the end for Brown, he recognizes the business aspect of college sports, even if he knows it means there is going to be change for schools nationwide.
“The short answer is we got to this point because of money. We can complain about it, about the money piece but last time I checked most things are like that,” Brown said.
“It’s a business, this is a business. The NFL, they’re making out of their decisions on the bottom line too. I think you either eat or you get eaten. At least right now from a West Virginia standpoint, we’re in a group that’s at least eating.”
