MORGANTOWN — Thoughts while driving home from South Bend, Ind., after covering the College Hall of Fame weekend induction of former West Virginia University quarterback Major Harris:

Last week, while interviewing new WVU athletic director Oliver Luck about his first week on the job, the talk turned to radio and television rights and that kind of planted a seed.

See, much of this restructuring of college football, which was initiated by the Big Ten, had to do with that conference possessing its own television network on cable and satellite and its desire to expand into some of the markets that belong to the Big East.

To do that, they would raid the Big East and take away Rutgers or Syracuse or Pittsburgh, which would open the East Coast market to them.

So?

Well, if the markets are so desirable, why doesn’t the Big East form its own network?

The truth is, the Big East actually has as big or bigger markets than does the Big Ten. Think about it for a minute.

Rutgers is in the New York metropolitan area. Syracuse is a big city. Pittsburgh is a big city. Marquette is in Milwaukee, Villanova in Philadelphia, DePaul in Chicago, which also would eat up Notre Dame sports other than football. Then you have Louisville and Cincinnati and Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fla.

What’s more, if any conference should expand, it is the Big East football conference, which surely will add a ninth team sometime in the future and, if not hurt by the Big Ten raid, could jump to 12 teams easily, maybe adding Memphis and Orlando to its market mix.

Luck was asked his thoughts on the matter. He noted that there are two different models at work in the industry.

“There’s the traditional model,” he said. “The ACC upped their deal with ESPN, for example. What they did is say to ESPN ‘Here’s our rights, how much will you give us for them?’ That’s the model pretty much everyone is using (including the Big East) except the Big Ten.

“They are on Comcast. In my house in Houston, I can get the Big 10 Network,” Luck continued. “I bought the premium package, mainly so I could watch my son, Andrew, play at Stanford. I can tell you this, I have not spent more than 20 seconds watching the Big Ten Network. I’m not interested in Purdue women’s softball.

“But I am contributing every month a dime to the Big Ten because it’s on my package. That deal is in place a lot of places. In some markets it may cost a quarter, in others a dollar. That’s a totally different business model.”

The way Luck sees it, because of that television model, they will continue to push expansion.

“In a way, it’s odd they picked Nebraska for expansion. It’s a great football program, but it’s a pretty small state,” he said. “If that is their business model, they eventually have to look at schools in a congested, large metropolitan area.”

But do they take a school simply because of its location? Luck thinks not.

“I look at a Rutgers and say to myself, ‘That just doesn’t fit with the Big Ten.’ It’s a fine institution, but it doesn’t seem to fit.”



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Former West Virginia running back Quincy Wilson has moved to Morgantown and begun working, leaving his professional football career in the dust ... so to speak.

Wilson, who is seventh all-time in career rushing at WVU with 2,608 yards, spent some time playing in Germany. It was when he was there that that unpronounceable and unspellable volcano in Iceland erupted.

While it was hundreds of miles away from Germany, it became a huge problem.

“It was really a serious thing,” Wilson said.

The ash floated on the wind currents over Europe.

“It disrupted travel,” Wilson said. No planes ran and trucks were banned for fear they would clog up with the volcanic ash.

“It was dreary,” Wilson said of the atmosphere. “It was like it was raining, but it didn’t hit the ground because really it wasn’t rain but the ash.”

The good news for Wilson, who had one of the great runs after a catch of screen pass in a devastating loss at Miami, is that he qualified for being with an NFL team for four years, meaning he will get the NFL’s lucrative pension.



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With the verbal commitment from 6-foot, 4-inch, 215-pound quarterback Brian Athey, WVU continues to move more toward a potential pass-oriented offense and away from the running game.

Athey is a throw-first quarterback out of Eden Prairie High in Minnesota. He’s a solid athlete, a star baseball player, but is not a 4.5 running or anything similar to it.

He says he’s capable of avoiding the rush but he’s going to be more out of the Marc Bulger school than the Patrick White school.

Athey is the grandson of Dwight Wallace, the former WVU assistant who now does color commentary on the radio, and Wallace admitted on the radio the other night that when he originally was giving Athey guidance about potential schools he didn’t include WVU because the style didn’t fit, but Athey had fallen in love with the program at WVU.

It appears that Coach Bill Stewart and his offensive coordinator, Jeff Mullen, have decided to mold their offense around their quarterback rather than recruiting a quarterback to fit the offense.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.