Earlier this summer during the period of conference realignment, one of the teams the Big 12 added was Arizona State.
Following the addition of Arizona State, the school’s athletic director, Ray Anderson, and president, Michael Crow, took the time to speak with the media.
Anderson began to speak about travel costs and things of that nature before he was interrupted by Crow who asked if he wanted a remote office in Morgantown to which he replied he would not be going to Morgantown.
“I promise I’m not going to Morgantown,” Anderson said. “I’m going to sign that to Jean Boyd. He can go to Morgantown. But send me to Texas and the rivalry with Arizona and starting a new one with BYU and Utah and Colorado.”
Following the comments, WVU athletic director Wren Baker said he spoke with Ray Anderson and discussed this with the media today during his press conference.
“I told him I know you said this on Saturday but I didn’t really get hit with it until Sunday, I’m at home trying to get my Jesus on with my family and catching shrapnel over this,” said Baker. “We had a great conversation and I’ve known Ray, not extraordinarily well, but we’ve known each other for a pretty good while. I suspected he didn’t mean that the way it was taken but it definitely hit a sore spot with all of us who are proud of West Virginia.
“And as somebody who really had not spent a lot of time in the state before I moved here, I’m a champion for people giving West Virginia a chance as a place to live, as a place to visit, as a place to vacation. It is a beautiful place full of some wonderful people and not enough people know about it. He [Anderson] was gracious, he was kind, I mean he started the conversation by saying ‘I’m really sorry, it was an attempt to be funny, president Crow knows I hate cold weather, he was giving me a hard time and I was giving him a hard time back and it just didn’t land like I thought it would.’ He said he knew pretty quickly it didn’t because the first person that admonished him was his wife he told me.”
Anderson did issue his own apology on Arizona Sports’ Bickley and Marotta show.
“Although those comments were said in jest and taken out of context, they were clumsy comments from me that I sincerely regret,” Anderson said. “Because I offended some people when no offense was intended and I apologize for that, I sincerely do. So I called Wren on Monday and we had a chance to talk and I explained the context. He graciously accepted my apology and certainly said he’d pass it on to their president Gordon Gee, who I know.”
In that conversation, Baker also made Anderson promise he would visit Morgantown many times over the next few years.
