Meet the Power-4 athletic director who just put himself under the microscope – Saturday Blitz

Overall, West Virginia’s Wren Baker is a good athletic director. Since taking over in 2022, the Mountaineers have made strides in several sports, with a big highlight being the huge strides the school has taken on the baseball diamond since Baker’s arrival, going 76-44 over the last two years combined.

However, at Morgantown, as at almost every other power-four athletic school, football moves the meter. And that meter has dropped very little over the past few seasons under head coach Neil Brown.

In Baker’s defense, he wasn’t hired until 2022, and the program has been a failure in the eyes of many for the past decade. So to pin it all on Baker, who is just approaching his two-year mark on the job, isn’t exactly fair. However, recent events have definitely brought more attention to Baker and the situation with the football team.

Baker inherited a nightmare with current Mountaineers head football coach Neil Brown, who has been in Morgantown for five full seasons, amassing just two winning campaigns.

In 2022, prior to his arrival, previous athletic director Shane Lyons signed Brown to a huge contract extension through 2021 that locked the coach into the 2026 season. With a pretty big buyout, there’s a good chance that despite the billboards flying around Morgantown, calling for Brown’s firing, it doesn’t make financial sense for Baker and the Mountaineers administration to part ways with Brown at this time. If they do, there’s a good chance they’ll have very little money left to find a replacement for him for 2025, leaving the team in even more of a mess in the long run.

Regardless, if Baker as athletic director decides to keep Brown around until 2025, it’s time for Brown to put up or shut up, or theoretically the odds are solid that he could be gone. If not, eyes will continue to turn to Baker, who is unlikely to have a solid leg at this point, as a buyout will be much more manageable.