COMMENTARY
MORGANTOWN W.Va. — It can be argued that the 2010s were the most consequential decade in the history of West Virginia athletics. Indeed, you’d probably have a difficult time convincing anyone that it wasn’t.
After more than a century of East Coast conference affiliations, the Mountaineers made a monumental leap to a league based in the Great Plains. There were a pair of high-profile football coaching changes. A rare trip to the Final Four. Even an Olympic gold medalist.
There was also monumental change across the face of college sports as a whole over the past decade, and that was reflected at West Virginia.
As the ’10s come to a close, here’s a look back at the 10 biggest moments in WVU sports from the decade that was.
10. WVU rifle wins five straight national titles (2013-17)
It was a banner decade for West Virginia’s most decorated athletic program.
For the second time in program history, the Mountaineers pulled off a streak of at least five consecutive national championships. Only the 1990s were a better time for WVU rifle, with the program winning the crown ever year from 1990-98.
West Virginia hasn’t exactly fallen off a cliff since its last title, finishing second in the country the past two years. Morgantown hosted the national championships for the first time in 2019.
9. Mon County Ballpark built, saving WVU baseball (2015)
When West Virginia joined the Big 12 — more on that later — one program in particular stuck out as the weakling. Baseball.
Creaky, tiny Hawley Field was enough to get by in the Big East, where baseball was treated as an afterthought and players spent half the season dodging snowflakes. It wasn’t going to cut it in a conference where teams regularly reach the College World Series.
The Big 12 mandated that WVU either upgrade its facilities or drop baseball. With some help from Monongalia County, the latter solution was made possible.
Mon County Ballpark opened in 2015, and Randy Mazey’s team has since broken a two-decade postseason drought with a pair of NCAA regional appearances.
In 2019, WVU hosted NCAA tournament games for the first time since 1955.
8. Women’s soccer finishes as national runner-up (2016)
Nikki Izzo-Brown’s 20th year at the helm of the West Virginia women’s soccer program was a historic one.
The Mountaineers headed into the NCAA tournament with a 19-1-1 record and continued winning their way to the first College Cup appearance in program history. West Virginia downed 21-time national champion North Carolina in the national semifinals before the run finally came to an end with a 3-1 loss to Southern California in the championship game.
7. Neal Brown hired as football coach (2019)
A decade from now, this importance of this event will probably rank significantly higher in the scheme of seminal moments for WVU athletics in the 2010s. But for now, we can only work with what has happened rather than what might happen.
The Mountaineers finished just 5-7 in Brown’s first year, but behind the scenes the fanbase was re-energized by a culture change after seven years of Dana Holgorsen had grown stale.
Brown’s first signing class is currently rated fourth in the Big 12, and his “Trust the Climb” mantra has most WVU fans looking forward to what the 2020s bring for the program.
6. Ginny Thrasher shoots for Olympic Gold (2016)
Thrasher had just completed her freshman year at West Virginia when she shot her way into history.
Thrasher was the first Olympian to win a gold medal at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, besting the field in the 10-meter air rifle competition. She edged out China’s Du Li with a final total of 208 points to Li’s 207.
Thrasher became the first WVU athlete to win a gold medal for the United States since James Jett helped the men’s 4×100 relay team win in the 1992 Barcelona Games.
5. Death of Bill Stewart (2012)
He was no longer West Virginia’s head coach, but the death of Bill Stewart at age 59 on May 21, 2012 still sent shockwaves throughout the state.
Less than a year following his resignation as WVU’s head football coach, Stewart suffered a fatal heart attack while at a golf outing with former West Virginia AD Ed Pastilong at Stonewall Jackson Resort. .
Stewart was a significant enough state figure that his unexpected death warranted official statements from both of West Virginia’s sitting U.S. Senators, and hundreds of mourners turned out for his funeral. He is memorialized by a highway exit in his name on Interstate 79 outside of Morgantown.
With replacement Dana Holgorsen now out of the picture, WVU began incorporating Stewart’s “Leave No Doubt” speech from the 2008 Fiesta Bowl on the video board at Milan Puskar Stadium in 2019.
4. Mountaineers blow out Clemson in Orange Bowl (2012)
If you asked 100 people whether they’d rather have Dana Holgorsen or Dabo Swinney in charge of their football program on the morning of Jan. 5, 2012, the pro-Holgorsen group probably would have crept into the 90s.
Holgorsen’s first year leading the Mountaineers ended with one of the biggest exclamation points to end any debut season as West Virginia destroyed Clemson for a 70-33 Orange Bowl win. The Mountaineers set bowl records for points, touchdowns (10), points in a quarter (35 in the second) and points in a half (49).
Geno Smith tied Iowa quarterback Chuck Long’s bowl record of six touchdown passes, while Tavon Austin tied four players with four touchdown receptions.
But rather than being a harbinger that West Virginia was ready to take the Big 12 by storm, the game goes down in history as little more than a confirmation of Smith’s brilliance as a college quarterback.
Clemson is 9-2 in the postseason since its West Virginia whipping, and is making its fourth national championship game appearance in the past five years.
Holgorsen, on the other hand, went 1-5 in bowl games after creaming Clemson. The Mountaineers are still waiting for their first Big 12 title.
3. WVU basketball reaches first Final Four since 1959 (2010)
The biggest on-field or on-court accomplishment for WVU sports in the 2010s took place in the decade’s first year.
March 2010 was the most magical month in West Virginia basketball history, with the Mountaineers winning their first-ever Big East title after surviving a trio of thrillers at Madison Square Garden.
WVU then rolled through the East Regional as a No. 2 seed, upsetting top-seeded Kentucky in the regional final to secure the program’s first Final Four berth since Jerry West’s senior season.
The Mountaineer magic ran out in Indianapolis, derailed by eventual national champion Duke. Any hopes of a miracle comeback against the Blue Devils were extinguished when Big East tournament and East Regional MVP Da’Sean Butler hit the floor with a knee injury midway through the second half.
Unfortunately, the image of Bob Huggins consoling the injured Butler ended up being the enduring one from WVU’s Final Four experience.
2. Bill Stewart forced out in disastrous ‘coach-in-waiting’ experiment (2011)
At the end of the ’00s, the concept of a coach-in-waiting briefly entered the college football mainstream.
Jimbo Fisher and Bobby Bowden made it work at Florida State, and Will Muschamp was named Mack Brown’s coach-in-waiting at Texas until it became clear that Brown was putting a heavy emphasis on “waiting.”
Following West Virginia’s experiment with a coach-in-waiting, the very concept became toxic on a national scale.
Then-AD Oliver Luck tried to have his cake and eat it too, hiring Holgorsen to be Stewart’s offensive coordinator and WVU coach-in-waiting in 2011. It ended up being yellowcake.
Stewart had no use for the courtesy victory lap that Luck was trying to grant him, and fed reporters stories regarding multiple alcohol-related incidents involving Holgorsen in an effort to turn the public against Luck and his unwanted offensive coordinator.
The information about Stewart being the source of those stories became public, and Luck was left dealing with a mess that gave him little choice but to pull the plug on the experiment and send Stewart packing.
The ugly divorce poisoned the water for Holgorsen, who was hard-pressed to win over Stewart loyalists without achieving a high level of success. The stigma never really went away, explaining in part Holgorsen’s unorthodox decision to leave West Virginia for the University of Houston in 2019.
1. West Virginia joins the Big 12 (2012)
As the saying goes, this is No. 1 with a bullet.
No event in the past decade has transformed the face of West Virginia athletics than the move from the Big East to the Big 12 — largely for better, but in some cases for worse.
The foundation of college athletics was shaken to its core between 2010-12, when decades of regionally based conferences that actually adhered to the laws of proximity and logic were torn apart by sheer greed for TV money.
ESPN’s creation of the Texas-only Longhorn Network in 2011 rubbed its Big 12 rivals the wrong way. Already teetering after Colorado and Nebraska bolted in 2010, the league suffered a seeming death-blow when Texas A&M and Missouri left for the SEC effective in 2012.
The league had a ready-made replacement for A&M in former Southwest Conference member TCU, but still needed to find a 10th program to join the mix. It became obvious that the Big East would be raided for that team, with both Louisville and West Virginia sparring to make the cut.
Back before he was coordinating with the White House to make sure the current impeachment process dies in the Senate or sitting on Supreme Court nominations for a calendar year, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell was lobbying feverishly to get Louisville into the Big 12 over the Mountaineers.
McConnell had powerful friends inside the league’s structure — Oklahoma president David Boren and Texas Tech chancellor Kent Hance. Both were former congressmen. Hance in particular cited concerns over Morgantown’s distance from Lubbock.
In turn, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin threatened a Senate investigation into McConnell’s actions, which only took place after WVU was already preparing to announce it was bound for the Big 12. Two days later, the Mountaineers had their official Big 12 invite.
Years later, the move keeps West Virginia’s athletic program nationally relevant heading into the 2020s. As much grief as Luck deserves for the failed coach-in-waiting experiment, his work keeping WVU in front of the Big 12 race should never be forgotten.
Louisville got its life raft a year later, joining the ACC alongside fellow Big East refugees Pitt and Syracuse after Maryland unexpectedly joined the Big Ten. Such an invite would not have been put forth to WVU, which multiple high-falutin’ ACC members frowned upon as an academic institution.
Geographically, the re-affliation stinks as much now as the day it happened.
WVU’s nearest conference opponent is Iowa State, some 820 miles away. It’s unrealistic for West Virginia fans to travel to any road game — a trait that once distinguished the program from its Big East counterparts. WVU could be on the road and still get the loudest cheers in a stadium.
Financially, the Big 12 has been a godsend.
In their final year together in the Big East, UConn produced $63 million in athletic revenue compared to West Virginia’s $60 million. Last year, West Virginia reaped $102.4 million in revenue in the Big 12 while American Athletic Conference member UConn made only $79 million — and spent $80 million.
That’s the future that likely awaited WVU if it did not beat out Louisville for the Big 12’s final opening.
For that reason, the move to the Big 12 was the biggest event for WVU in the 2010s — and may remain so for decades to come.