Three teams West Virginia would like to add to the Big 12

With the constantly changing landscape of college sports, it can be difficult to keep track of which program is in which conference and who your favorite team will have to play against to win the division title that these days can automatically earn you a spot in the soon-to-be-inaugurated 12-team College Football Playoff.

In the process, many traditional rivalries faded and in some cases even resurfaced. In addition, regionality was sacrificed in favor of lucrative TV markets and coast-to-coast competition. And today, the traditional brands we know and love about college athletics look very different.

West Virginia used to share the Big East with traditional regional rivals such as Pitt, Rutgers and Syracuse, with the champion earning a spot in the BCS Bowl in football – the latter system has since been swept to the dustbin of history. When they joined the Big 12 after the dissolution of their former conference, they found new prominent national opponents on the schedule, such as Oklahoma and Texas, both of which are now preparing to join the SEC in the fall.

With football being the highest-grossing college sport and the future seemingly destined for more changes, it’s almost certain that conference realignment will take another round or two. Here are three different programs that West Virginia would certainly like to see added to the Big 12 in the future expansion.

Pitt

The rivalry, known as The Backyard Brawl, began in 1895 and is one of the oldest and most intense in college football. First College football radio broadcast in history in 1921 to a heartbreaking WVU Loss which knocked the Mountaineers out of the national championship race in the 100th edition of the rivalry in 2007, the series is littered with historic college football moments.

The two played together in the Big East in the 1990s and 2000s, but the conference imploded in the early 2010s when Pitt moved to the ACC and WVU to the Big 12 – the series was interrupted, which broke a series of 68 consecutive meetings. The series was renewed in 2022, with annual meetings planned between 2022–2025 and 2029–2032.

If Pitt were to join the Big 12, the Brawl would become the oldest rivalry between the conference schools and the fourth largest in terms of number of games played in a conference series, behind Farmageddon (Iowa State-Kansas State), The Revivalry (TCU-Baylor) and the Sunflower Showdown (Kansas-Kansas State).

Virginia Tech

One of WVU’s other strongest rivalries is with Virginia Tech, known in football as the “Battle For the Black Diamond Trophy.” The trophy’s name is aptly derived from the coal mining tradition of Appalachia (with “Black Diamond” being a slang term for coal), as vast seams of coal make up much of the rural, mountainous region between Morgantown and Blacksburg.

The two teams first met over 100 years ago in 1912 and last met in 2022. Annual meetings from 1973 to 2005 laid the foundation for the rivalry that is a big deal in the eyes of many Mountaineer fans, from Generation Z to Baby Boomers.

The series died out in the mid-200s and 2010s, when the Hokies moved to the ACC while WVU stayed in the Big East and eventually moved to the Big 12. When the series was renewed for the 2021-2022 season, then-WVU athletic director Oliver Luck and then-Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer divided the opinion that “it just made sense”.

Now that it looks like the ACC (which Pitt also still calls home) could implode at any moment, Virginia Tech would make sense as a conference opponent. With WVU long a geographic underdog in the conference, the addition of UCF and Cincinnati last year gave the conference an eastern contingent. Adding Virginia Tech (and Pitt) would bring the conference to five programs in the eastern time zone and could open up the possibility of breaking the conference into smaller groups or divisions that make travel easier.

Louisville

Another regional opponent that could easily fit into the mix of a more eastern-leaning section of the Big 12 would be Louisville. WVU has some history with the Cardinals – they played each other several times in the 1980s and 1990s, and the two battled each other again as conference opponents in numerous hard-fought Big East matchups in the mid-2000s.

Louisville also has a long rivalry with Cincinnati, which is another reason to include Louisville in the conference after the Bearcats joined last season. They also share conference history with the other two suggested programs on this list, Pitt and Virginia Tech.