The football coaching position at West Virginia is now in the hands of Wren Baker.
Baker, the 44-year-old North Texas athletic director, has been hired as West Virginia’s new AD, sources tell Sports Illustrated. The move is on the way to being finalized. Baker replaces Shane Lyons in what was a stunning dismissal earlier this fall. Lyons is now deputy athletic director at Alabama.
Baker, an Oklahoma native, spent more than six years at North Texas, most recently guiding the Mean Green into a new conference, the AAC, which it will join next year. He is a noted fundraiser who’s led record fundraising years at four different universities, including his stops at UNT and as a deputy at Memphis and Missouri.
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A likable marketer and promoter who is well respected among colleagues, Baker’s most glaring first task in Morgantown is football. Coach Neal Brown, hired by Lyons after winning 35 games in four years at Troy, is 22–25 in four seasons atop the Mountaineers’ program. Brown received a new contract two years ago that extends through 2026 and comes with a buyout that currently sits at $16 million.
WVU president Gordon Gee announced earlier this month that a new athletic director would evaluate Brown and make a decision on his future. Sources tell SI that the expectation is for him to remain as coach for the 2023 season, though a formal announcement hasn’t been made.
West Virginia would be entering the coaching market late. The transfer portal opens next week, and early national signing day is less than a month away. The coaching hiring cycle has accelerated tremendously, with many of the top coaches already having found new jobs or having signed extensions at their current school. Three Power 5 programs—Stanford, Cincinnati and Colorado—have active searches ongoing.
It’s why many of those connected to the program believe that Baker will take a year to evaluate Brown.
Brown’s one winning season came in 2020, when the Mountaineers went 6–4. In one of the more competitive conferences in America from top to bottom, WVU slipped below expectations this year despite signing former USC and Georgia quarterback JT Daniels. The Mountaineers finished 5–7. However, they went on a late-season run, beating Oklahoma and winning at Oklahoma State after starting the season 0–2 with a loss to Pitt in the final minutes and against Kansas in overtime.
Despite its historic football competitiveness, West Virginia is one of the tougher jobs in the Power 5. It has one of the lowest budgets among the 65 Power 5 programs (51st) and Morgantown is both remote in location and in comparison to its Big 12 members. WVU’s closest conference team is 800 miles away.
In many ways, the Mountaineers were adrift during realignment, denied membership to two more regionally sensible leagues such as the ACC and the SEC. WVU athletics hasn’t been the same since its move away from the Big East, where its football program lorded over many conference mates in spending and historic success. Under coaches Rich Rodriguez, Bill Stewart and Dana Holgorsen, the Mountaineers won at least nine games eight times in a 10-year stretch starting in 2002. Since joining the Big 12 in ’12, they’ve reached nine wins once (’16).
Still, West Virginia has a prideful, vocal following and a deep, rich history. It owns a dubious but also impressive stat: No major college football program has won more games in its history without having claimed a national championship than West Virginia. In a quasi-national title game in 1988, WVU lost the Fiesta Bowl to Notre Dame. In 2007, the Mountaineers were en route to the BCS title game when they lost at home to rival Pitt as 28-point favorites.
At the top of its athletic department, it now has a new face for the first time since 2015, when Lyons replaced Oliver Luck.
Baker has proven to be a driven administrator who’s been approached over the years by several Power 5 schools, turning away interest because of the security at UNT. He made around $800,000 per year as one of the Group of 5’s highest-paid ADs.
As a deputy at Memphis overseeing football, Baker worked closely with coach Justin Fuente, the former Virginia Tech coach who is out of the industry for now. At Missouri, he assisted in coaching searches in football and baseball and led the athletic department’s external relations team, including development, marketing, licensing, the ticket office and strategic communications.
As the AD at NCAA Division II power Northwest Missouri State, he secured the largest gift in the athletic department’s history. At his first AD job at Rogers State, he also coached basketball for one season, leading the team to a 20–11 record. He got his master’s degree from Oklahoma State, where he was a graduate assistant and then basketball operations assistant for legendary coach Eddie Sutton.
