The West Virginia Mountaineers have put in some impressive work on the recruiting trail this offseason, both in their high school recruiting class and their transfer portal class. They've been recognized with Top 15 classes in each category, and the future seems bright for WVU.
But there is some speculation left to be answered, although a definitive answer may never come to fruition – how much did the Mountaineers spend on their roster in this new NIL and revenue share era? And while there isn't a truly solid answer to this question yet, we can likely estimate a price range. Let's take a look.
Putting a price tag on the West Virginia Mountaineers roster
With the most recent additions last weekend of Seydou Tarore and Joson Sanon, the Mountaineers have landed six portal commits, with four of those 4-star prospects according to 247Sports. They also have a five-player freshman class which features four ESPN 4-star prospects, one of whom is listed as a five-star by multiple other services. That type of haul does not come cheap.
On last week's episode of Country Roads Confidential, EerSports' Chris Anderson and Mike Casazza delved into what the big takeaways are from landing by what all appearances seems to be a quite expensive roster, and discussed what they've heard about what a potential price tag might have looked like.
"The biggest takeaway I have is they got the two transfers and they spent the money," said EerSports' Chris Anderson. "The money was there. What we heard with Sanon is that he was asking for a pretty penny, and he was going to receive a pretty penny."
"After they got Traore, it was like, Traore probably wasn't cheap, and they've already got a bunch pf dudes, they also probably had to pay for some of their high school guys – definitely had to pay for some of their high school guys. They may just not have the money anymore. And then they did."
"How do they make that work," Casazza added. "There's a lot of diesel in that engine, it looks like. Because it's just one player after another, and competitive too. A couple of these players took other visits, or were known players...for that to happen in this like eleventh hour is really encouraging."
All this talk about pretty pennies might make fans wonder just how pretty of a penny was spent on this class? Well, once again, now hard figures have been released and it's possible we'll never know exactly. But Casazza does report he was told the Mountaineers spent $6.5 million last season, and he and Anderson don't think it's outside the realm of possibility this year's roster hit double-digits.
"This is where I said it might be double, and then somebody posted it on the board and you said, 'we didn't report that. I'll check with Chris,'" Anderson said.
"I was like, I don't know man, if you go from 6 1/2 to 13 1/2, that's a pretty big jump," Casazza said. "They might be there. They really might be there. Because Sadler, Sylla, and Bizjack were, I would say I'm reliably told, close to their total spend last year...That's three players, and they have 14."
"Two of the guys are walk-ons and they're going to get nominal stuff, and then there's a range of transfers too. But you have big players, like tally guys, and big players as in big names. Is it crazy to think they went – I think 10 million is pretty conservative t this point....is it crazy to look at this and say it's a double-digit, perhaps $13 million dollar roster?
Anderson added that he won't listen to 'anyone who tries to tell me it's under 10." So while we're not certain yet of how much has been shelled out by Ross Hodge's staff to put together this incoming roster, it's safe to say that it was, in fact, quite a pricey investment. Now, we'll have to wait to see if that investment pays off.
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