West Virginia football future schedules coming into focus?
West Virginia played an interesting 2020 schedule with only one non-conference game at home against Eastern Kentucky and things returned to normal the last two years.
And with the Big 12 Conference sticking to a nine-game league schedule we look at what the future slates look like for the Mountaineers.
Texas and Oklahoma will be exiting the Big 12 Conference following the 2023 season while for one year the league will operate as a 14-team league for one season with Cincinnati, BYU, Central Florida and Houston joining the league.
But those moves affect the overall schedule for West Virginia as the Big 12 plans to remain without divisions and maintain a nine game league schedule moving forward for now.
One of the latest additions to the schedule came when Robert Morris announced that they will be traveling to Morgantown either Aug. 30 or Sept. 6 of the 2025 season. West Virginia already had a home-game scheduled with Pittsburgh set for Sept. 13, 2025 initially leaving one open slot for that season.
From 2023-27 the entire non-conference slate has already been filled out.
Pittsburgh and West Virginia are set to play the second in a four games series in Morgantown in 2023.
The two have met a total of 105 times with Pittsburgh holding the 62-40-3 series edge, although the Mountaineers have won 15 of the last 23 on the gridiron.
The Mountaineers will open on the road at Penn State Sept. 2, 2023 and then host both Duquesne and Pittsburgh on back-to-back weekends this coming fall.
Then in 2024 West Virginia will open the season hosting Penn State and Albany before traveling to Pittsburgh Sept. 14 for the third of the four scheduled meetings.
The addition of Robert Morris (Aug. 30) and the road trip to Ohio (Sept. 6) to the 2025 schedule fills the slate along with the final game of the Pittsburgh series (Sept. 13).
Moving onto to 2026 and 2027, there is a home-and-home series with Alabama beginning in Morgantown Sept. 5, 2026 and then Sept. 4, 2027 in Tuscaloosa. The 2026 slate also features a home match up with FCS opponent UT-Martin Sept. 12, 2026 as well as a road match-up with East Carolina set for Sept. 19, 2026.
The 2027 will include that trip to Alabama and home matchups against VMI (Sept. 11) and Ohio (Sept. 18).
Looking further ahead in 2028 there is a neutral site matchup with Tennessee in the books scheduled for Charlotte which is another regional game as well as the final game against Ohio in a three-game series during the 2029 season.
The 2029 season also will be the start of another four-game home and home with Pittsburgh giving the Mountaineers a marquee rivalry matchup locked into the slate.
All in all, there will be seven games split between hosting with Pittsburgh, Penn State (2), Alabama (2) and that neutral game against Tennessee.
There is obviously a concentrated regional feel to the schedule with the Mountaineers renewing rivalries with many of the traditional opponents that had been staples of the schedule for years.
The trip to East Carolina, Ohio and FCS home match-ups with Long Island, Towson, Duquesne, Albany, Robert Morris, UT-Martin and VMI round out the schedules as of today providing a nice balance between power five regional games, power five opponents and a lighter matchup.
It meets the requirements that athletic director Wren Baker suggested to WVSports.com when he sat down with us after taking the job.
“When you’re playing nine conference games it’s really important you feel you can go 2-1, 3-0 in that non-conference schedule,” Baker said.
The slate is a nice mix of closer regional opponents which could obviously change depending on how things continue to evolve but for now things are coming together.
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