To compete in the new revenue sharing era of college athletic, schools are going to have to find new and creative ways to find funding if they want to have the money to compete on the national stage. For West Virginia Mountaineers Athletic Director Wren Baker, that means taking WVU athletics towards what has become a common trend in college sports in recent years, but has yet been avoided by the athletic department in Morgantown -- selling naming rights to the facilities.
We've all seen arenas and stadiums sell off their naming rights for a big check -- some, like Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, seem normal enough. Others, like FIU's Pitbull Stadium (yes, that's the rapper Pitbull), come off as a bit of an odd pairing. But now, Milan Puskar Stadium and the WVU Coliseum might join the list of facilities bearing a corporate name -- Baker discussed how the Mountaineers have been exploring the possibility during a recent appearance on MetroNews podcast 3 Guys Before The Game.
"We're down the path on one naming rights opportunity that's significant, a seven-figure opportunity," Baker said. "To be named soon, but we're shopping both of those. One of those is close. And we're shopping other things as well."
Baker did maintain that he would like to keep 'Mountaineer Field' and 'Coliseum' as parts of the names of each facility to keep some tradition involved with the naming process, but also was adamant that the money involved with such a deal would help put WVU sports in a better position to succeed.
“I think with Mountaineer Field, we would probably try to encourage somebody to leave Mountaineer in there, so Three Guys Mountaineer Field, something like that. I know that West Virginians get endeared to tradition, but I’ll tell you something else that I have found that West Virginians are pretty endeared to is winning. If it pencils at an amount that makes sense for us to do, we have to look at it even if it slightly adjusts some of the things on tradition."