The grievances Bob Huggins has aired about the Big 12 schedule are not new to you. I still think, given a do-over, West Virginia would handle differently the Friday-Tuesday set to open conference play. I have to think the Mountaineers would have a) stayed on the road and not traveled home after the Oklahoma State game Friday and then flown to Texas Tech Monday or b) would have flown home Friday and stayed in Lubbock, Texas, following the Tuesday night game. WVU had some options because the spring semester had not yet begun.

But I also have to think Huggins knew that was just the beginning and that the three 9 p.m. EST road games in a five-game, 14-day stretch as well as three straight Saturday-Monday sets in February are going to be a challenge and he’d prefer not to see one or the other or both in the future.

That said, the Mountaineers are not vagrants, and they’re indeed fortunate to have private charters to all their road games. Believe it or not, what’s come to be an afterthought, a luxury almost taken for granted throughout all the major conferences and at the major programs, this didn’t exist before Huggins arrived in the spring of 2007.

“We talked about that very briefly before I signed a contract — I went down to the business office, and they said they had it in the budget,” said Huggins, who returned to his alma mater to replace Beilein in the spring of 2007. “Then, all of a sudden, they didn’t have it in the budget. I basically told them, ‘I think you hired the wrong guy. I’m too old to do that, man.’ ”

As a compromise, Huggins agreed to work with the Mountaineer Athletic Club so the team could charter for the 2007-08 season. That created the Legacy Fund, which no longer finances the charters and instead covers travel costs for recruiting. Huggins and the MAC “raised some money, but it wasn’t enough for all the charters,” but the team nevertheless had its own plane wherever it went.

“It never was an issue again,” he said.

Life’s nevertheless not perfect for WVU. It’s one of four Big 12 schools serviced by an airport an hour or so from campus.

Photo credit: WVU