Arizona State AD Ray Anderson makes West Virginia punchline of joke about Big 12 travel costs

Arizona State is set to become one of the farthest-most west members of the Big 12 after joining the conference for the 2024 season alongside a handful of other Pac-12 schools. The Sun Devil suits are now coming up with ways to minimize travel in the now vast Big 12 territory.

ASU president Michael Crow suggested that Utah, BYU, Colorado, Arizona, Baylor and TCU be grouped together as a division for Olympic sports that don’t have the budget of sports like football, basketball and baseball. This is to avoid traveling over 2,000 miles to far eastern teams like West Virginia.

The notion of traveling to Morgantown to attend a sporting event wasn’t something athletic director Ray Anderson was willing to make happen.

“I promise I’m not going to Morgantown,“ Anderson said. “I’m going to assign that to [deputy AD] Jean Boyd.”

As you can imagine, most WVU fans and officials alike did not take kindly to the comments, regardless if Anderson was joking or not. The comments made West Virginia athletic director Wren Baker respond to Anderson’s comments in a subtle way on social media after the fact.

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” Baker wrote on Twitter in response. “People who love West Virginia and people who haven’t been here.”

It’s inevitable that ASU and WVU will be forced to meet at some point down the line given the fact that they’ll be in the same conference moving forward after 2024 — so Anderson will have to cave in eventually. There will be growing pains for the next couple of seasons as everyone attempts to navigate the new look conferences across the NCAA, and travel has been at the forefront of the discussion.

Ever since the Mountaineers joined the Big 12, West Virginia has been isolated from the rest of the conference on the eastern portion of the United States. They’ve had to cover 1,000-plus miles on nearly every conference road trip since, and are now having to make even longer trips to make it to towns like Tempe, Arizona. It’s only an issue for the new teams because they’re not used to making those types of trips.

That’s all going to change once the 2024 realignment takes place. Geography concerns will be filled with television dollars and in the end, everyone will make their money — except for the Pac-12 who have been left in the dust by what was formally known as the power five conferences.