The Big 12 will be undergoing changes for the 2024 season with the additions of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State to bring the league to 16-teams.

That also means that there will be changes to the scheduling format not only in football but across the board in basketball and the various Olympic sports.

While football is a different animal given the charter flights and the fact that the league will look to generate the most possible teams for at-large appearances in the College Football Playoff, the other sports are simply different.

When comparing sports such as soccer, baseball and track, those teams are staying the night in different locations and then catching early flights that often feature connections. West Virginia Athletic Director Wren Baker wants to be sure that coaches are engaged in that discussion as well as student athletes.

The Big 12 will have subcommittees for every sport when it comes to looking at different scheduling models, with Baker serving on the men’s basketball one for example, that will look at all possibilities.

At West Virginia, athletic department officials have already started to model what some of the travel could look like in order to understand what they could be facing with the four new western teams in the mix. But that wait shouldn’t be long considering that they’ll know pretty quickly what the schedules will need to look like with the 2024 season rapidly approaching.

Baker believes that despite the distances of the new teams there are models that the Big 12 can use that could actually reduce costs in some sports when it comes to travel. That could be divisions based geographically or even four-team pods to help cut costs.

Now, that’s no guarantee because there are also models that show that travel could increase depending on what the Big 12 ultimately decides to do in each sport.

“There’s a way for us to cut considerable expense and more importantly to keep student athletes in the classroom and out of hotels and airports more than we do now with this expansion,” Baker said. “This expansion does not have to mean we have to travel further.”

Baker admitted that while he is excited about where the Big 12 is positioned and how this round of conference realignment impacts the league, as a fan of college athletics he is sad for what happened to the Pac-12 Conference in the process.

Still given the fact that there seems to be some type of consolidation around how many schools are going to be in power conferences and how many power conferences there will be, the Mountaineers are positioned very well when most times in the history of the school it’s been the opposite.

And while travel could indeed be a concern, some schools that were in the Pac-12 are facing a reality that they could have $20-25 million cut from their budget due to realignment.

“I could argue that student athlete experience is going to potentially suffer. I believe there is a way for us to come together as a conference and look at scheduling that doesn’t send track teams, soccer teams, volleyball teams all the way to Utah to play every year,” he said.

Now, it’s up to the Big 12 to figure out exactly what that looks like for the other sports.

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