Wren Baker: WVU Football's 'Overall Spend' Now Ranks Among Big 12's Top Half

In its current structure, college athletics is very similar to Major League Baseball. If you have a serious pool of resources like the Los Angeles Dodgers (or Texas Tech, for a Big 12 reference), you're probably going to be in a position to win a bunch of games. If you don't have money, well, more likely than not, you are going to be up against it.

Early in the NIL game, West Virginia was one of those schools in the latter. They were swimming, trying to keep their head above water, and in the last couple of years, they've made a ton of progress and are now in a position to compete at a much higher level.

During a recent interview with Big 12 Today, WVU athletic director Wren Baker talked about how far the Mountaineers have come, specifically in football with the season just around the corner.

Baker goes in-depth on WVU's NIL situation

West Virginia University of Director Athletics Wren Baker | Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

“If we look at the past, I think it’s a combination of things. I came in in ’22, and our activity around NIL was very minimal. We were always making progress, but we were always coming from behind. And as you know, if someone gets ahead of you in college athletics, they don’t stop and wait for you to catch up. So by the time we would get to $5 million, people were at 8, 9, or $ 10 million. We were always just trying to figure out how to catch up.

"That puts you in a really tough position because you’re trying to recruit young talent you can grow, but as they grow, people are trying to recruit them away from you. If you lose somebody who’s ready to play, then it puts extraordinary pressure on you because you got to go in the portal and bid against everybody to find somebody who’s ready to play. And so you just kind of end up in this vicious cycle, and unless you get really fortunate, it becomes very difficult.

"Even last year, when we brought Rich in, we gave him the biggest budget by far. We had more than 2x of what we had done the year before, but it was probably somewhere in the middle third of the league, but probably not in the top half. Because he got here so late, and when you look at what was left available, the price and the return on that was extraordinary, so he actually set on some of his money and used it the following spring, which I thought was very smart on his part.

"When you look at our recruiting class and our portal class, we tremendously upgraded talent. Our overall spend this year, I know it’s in the top half of the league, somewhere between fifth and seventh, and going into next year, we’ve increased that quite a bit to make sure that retention is there. As Rich said in his presser last week, we have the money to retain these guys, and we’re going to.”

What the future looks like for WVU Football

West Virginia University head coach Rich Rodriguez | Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

If the trio of freshmen who carry high expectations — RB Amari Latimer, OT Kevin Brown, and S Matt Sieg — deliver, you have to do whatever it takes to keep them in place to truly build toward something. The same goes for QB Mike Hawkins Jr., WR TaRon Francis, EDGE Tobi Haastrup, and others.

As I've said many times before, I don't think we truly know what WVU's ability is to retain players. In the past, yeah, those guys who were talented enough to leave were gonners because West Virginia simply couldn't compete with what they were being offered elsewhere. Now that they are competing with the upper tier of the Big 12, you'd have to think they will be able to hold on to those key building blocks and have a sustained winner.

Add us as a preferred source on Google