Why not OHIO @ WVU?

WVU could not beat us, so they dropped us. Today they have the Dayton mentality, they will not come to Athens.

Ed Pastilong was the WVU AD during that run and he just retired a year or so ago.  WVU was a Final Four team.  They are not going to commit to road games in Athens.  Dayton and WVU both sell a lot of basketball tickets now.  There is no way they are going to pass up that revenue to come to a MAC school.  As much as I loved it for my community, the OU/WVU home-home series will never happen again.  We are lucky to have the Marshall series at this point.

People keep saying that, but have we even asked them? Dayton just went to Akron a couple years ago. They also went to Toledo, but I think that was because the coaches were friends. Of course, they go to Miami every other year. If they will go to Akron I don't know why they wouldn't come to Athens, although Akron has probably had better records/RPI's the last few years.

I'm not sure we've tried all that hard either.  Oxford Tech plays Xavier and Dayton very regularly.  I know they are closer then we are, but I really don't think travel budgets is the key to this issue.  It's probably not having the right people, like Battle Cat, placing the calls.   

If we rise to national prominence, we're not longer unremarkable. But look at Gonzaga and Butler: They can pull in good teams now. Sometimes it's on a neutral floor, but they're getting the games.

Crazy thing is that they host those teams and draw 4,000 fans tops. You bring Xavier or Dayton to the Convo and I guarantee at least 8,000, even over Winter Break. Get them here with the students and we've got an all-time crowd on our hands.

Kent also has Shawnee State at the MAC Center Jan 2nd. I don't really like Alcorn (SWAC), Morehead (OVC), at Western Carolina (Southern). A program that has won as much as Kent State should be able to do better than games against leagues like that.

Interesting thought, but Xavier and Dayton are far above Marshall and Duquesne at this point. We play Marshall every year, and we used to play Duquesne about every year before TOS. Duquesne is probably the third best team in their own city right now, with Pitt and the rising program at Robert Morris.

WVU vs Ohio? Was a result of Larry & Catlett being pals from various Nike coaches outings and sponsored golfing.

Catlett liked the geographically close games in that era, and the games were played very early in their move to the BigEast. They essentially dated schedule wise to the early-90s Atlantic 10 era at WVU, where strength of schedule was not much of a consideration by the HC. You will note WVU had several near misses of at-larges in that era, quite probably as direct results of mediocre scheduling.

Why is there still any bad blood? An assistant AD still on staff there after the Luck transition went through the roof on a couple occasions when we broadcast our hoops games with WVU and he/they felt we had encroached on their home TV markets without paying them fairly for the rights. We believed we obeyed the contracts as written. He is still on staff there but de-emphasized. He did not understand at the time the concept of DMAs. Morgantown is in the Pittsburgh DMA. Under my pals Derek Scott and Paul Ladwig, we ran the games in several adjacent markets in WV/VA/OH, but not in Pittsburgh. Crux of the problem was us "selling" the game in the Clarksburg DMA, whose stations are seen in Morgantown. Blah, blah, blah.......TV inside baseball......blah, blah......frame sync.....blah blah.....Glendive, MT.

WVU played Ohio to 1999. It must have been about straight years that the two schools played. WVU was football only for its first few years in the Big East, not moving over until 1995. Virginia Tech was football only until 1999 playing its basketketball in the A10. I once met somebody who said he had memories of camping out at the baksetball arena for when UMass came to town and this memory prevailed over VT football which was strange. In those days to follow on what you mention above there wasn't as much science into scheduling by the big guys to pad schedules maximizing win totals across the Big East. In recent years it looks like Huggins has taken on a more agressive schedule with strong mid majors and a few BCS teams.