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Lyons blasts Gee in discussing detailed departure from WVU athletics

In his first public interview since being dismissed as West Virginia University’s Director of Athletics two weeks ago to the day, Shane Lyons went into detail how that decision came about, while admitting it caught him off guard that President E. Gordon Gee was looking to go in another direction.

“It was a complete surprise,” Lyons said on MetroNews Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval. “Two weeks earlier, I have a text message [from Gee] saying, ‘I know there’s a lot of pressure on us and I wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with anybody else rather than you.’”

The pressure stemmed from the football program’s lack of success. The Mountaineers wrapped up a 5-7 season Saturday with a win at Oklahoma State, bringing head coach Neal Brown’s career record at West Virginia to 22-25 in four seasons. The 2022 campaign marked the Mountaineers’ third losing season under Brown and the second time in which they failed to qualify for a bowl game.

“It boils down to the football situation,” Lyons said. “A lot of heat was surrounding our football program at that time. I look at it that I’m the scapegoat.”

Lyons came under fire for extending Brown’s contract through 2026 following a 6-4 season in 2020 that finished with a win over Army in the Liberty Bowl. It was progress from a 5-7 finish in Brown’s first season, though it came in a COVID-impacted year when Eastern Kentucky was the only non-conference opponent and the Mountaineers did not face eventual Big 12 champion Oklahoma.

“The culture was right and recruiting was heading in the right direction,” Lyons said. “His name had come up for a couple jobs in Auburn and South Carolina. As an Athletic Director, you start juggling this to say, ‘what if he wins the next year?’ Well, if he wins the next year, his buyout was 1.5-2 million dollars, which is not much in our business. So my thinking was we need to increase his buyout if he ends up leaving to be close to 5 million dollars, which we ended up doing.”

Much of that extension fell on Lyons, but the former West Virginia Athletic Director said it was a collaborative decision that also took into consideration the thoughts of Gee, current Interim Director of Athletics Rob Alsop and the chair of WVU’s Board of Governors David Alvarez.

“President Gee was involved and Rob Alsop was involved and ultimately the chairman of the board Dave Alvarez signed off,” Lyons said. “It’s not done in a vacuum that Shane Lyons did this deal on his own. These types of contracts with a high-profile football coach are done in collaboration with other individuals.”

Lyons said Gee also indicated he felt the former athletic director needed to be more aggressive in keeping up with the current landscape of college athletics, of which much centers around student-athletes profiting from their Name, Image and Likeness.

However, Lyons said the athletic department and coaches could not do much in the way of promoting Country Roads Trust for fundraising because of federal Title IX funding that stipulates schools must match dollar for dollar funding for male and female athletes. There could be Title IX violations due to CRT being geared more toward male athletes.

“They wanted our coaches to be more involved in the promotion of that and from what I understand, they wanted us to be more involved in identifying potential donors for fundraising aspects of that,” Lyons said. “We can do education. We can do tax and contract litigation and all of that for our student-athletes. But making the deals themselves, we can’t get involved with. If we start making the deals ourselves or identifying actual sponsors or people to give to the trust, then that starts getting closer and closer that you as an athletic department are involved and it could run Title IX implications. If it’s all done by them, then it’s not an issue.

“Based on the discussions with President Gee, I think he thought we needed to be more aggressive in that area.”

Lyons said Gee also referenced the NCAA Transfer Portal as a reason West Virginia would be in the mix for a new athletic director, though the Parkersburg native seemed unsure why.

“The transfer portal is not an athletic director’s responsibility,” Lyons said. “It’s our coaches and the assistant coaches who recruit from the portal. ‘Well, we don’t think we’ve used the portal well enough.’ Well, I just saw last night watching the [men’s] basketball game that coach [Bob] Huggins used the portal pretty well. We’ve done the same thing in football. We’re going to lose some kids to the portal and gain some kids from the portal. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense when that was brought up in the discussion.”

Lyons, who has since accepted a position to return to Alabama and serve as Executive Deputy Director of Athletics/Chief Operating Officer, said Brown would be given a fifth season as the Mountaineers’ head football coach if he were still Director of Athletics at WVU.

“I would want to to keep him. I think he checks every box that we’re looking for as a head coach,” Lyons said. “Unfortunately, the big box is he needs to check is to win more football games. I believe that’s coming in the future. Right now, he’s a little bit below .500, but you look at it and say, ‘Can we build off of this?’ The answer is yes, it can be built off of. It’s a process. It’s not going to happen instantaneously, especially some of the players that he inherited and so on. It’s going to take a lot longer than what people look at it as three or four years.”

He added that when Brown was hired at WVU in January 2019, “everybody was dancing in the streets.”

Lyons, who earned two degrees from West Virginia University, said he will continue to support Mountaineer athletics, though admitted to feeling resentment about a dismissal that followed a contract extension in January and performance evaluation he described as “glowing” in June.

“I’m disappointed with the loyalty to some people and there will be bitterness there,” Lyons said. “[Gee and Alsop] called themselves friends. To blindside in this regard, that’s not the way I do business. To my knowledge, the board was not the one that made this decision. The decision was made from a campus level and was taken to the board. 

“I’ll be a West Virginia fan. I watched the game Saturday and cheered for them. I have a relationship with these coaches and student athletes and I want to see them perform at a very high level. My mark will always be here. I built roughly 200 million dollars worth of facilities. Those things aren’t going away. That’s only going to help West Virginia in the future. You’ll look back and say Shane Lyons left his mark here in a very positive way.”





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