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Huggins has idea to alleviate West Virginia travel concerns in Big 12

Huggins wants to see the Big 12 use a plan to alleviate travel concerns for West Virginia.
Huggins wants to see the Big 12 use a plan to alleviate travel concerns for West Virginia.

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The Big 12 Conference will undergo a reshuffling in the next several years and in a way that could be a good thing in one aspect if you ask West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins.

The league is set to lose both Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC, while it is set to welcome four new members in Cincinnati, Central Florida, Houston and BYU.

The dates that all of this will happen has yet to be finalized, but it is expected that the new members will join in time for the 2023-24 season while the Sooners and Longhorns are expected to remain in the league through the 2024-25 year.

If that timeline plays out, it’s possible that the league could be a 14-team version for two seasons before moving to a 12-team model permanently.

The Mountaineers have been members of the Big 12 since 2012 and one thing that has consistently bothered Huggins is the demands required in terms of travel.

“People say sometimes it looks like you guys are a little bit tired. Follow us around for a little while,” Huggins said. “I’m tired and I don’t play anymore.”

That’s because the travel schedule forces West Virginia into multiple hour flights to locations as the only team in the eastern time zone in the current configuration. That was part of the deal when they accepted membership into the 10-team league, but it does present its challenges.

Compare that to when the Mountaineers have to travel much shorter distances to locations when the league blocks them with back-to-back road games and it’s easy to see the difficulties. That is one thing that the league has done to help ease the burden of the travel by blocking consecutive road games especially during times where the students aren’t in class, but it’s still an uphill climb.

“The travel in this league for us is brutal,” Huggins said.

That’s where the shifting of the league could play into the Mountaineers’ favor. Both Cincinnati and Central Florida are both located in the eastern time zone and Huggins believes that if the league elects to divide into ways that the the Mountaineers could be grouped with those teams.

That is far from a foregone conclusion and there has been no determination on what those divisions or how the league could ultimately look like but the opportunity is there to help ease some of those concerns.

“If they have a divide that really helps us,” Huggins said. “Time changes, we don’t have to do the time change thing and everything that goes with it.”

Obviously we won’t know if that’s the case until the eventual decisions are announced, but it is a way to at least split the travel in basketball down significantly by locating the teams that are closer to West Virginia for two-games a year as opposed to the current round-robin makeup.

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