There has been some controversy about the status of West Virginia's application to the SEC. A report by the Cincinnati 247sports site said that the SEC rejected West Virginia. We covered in Sprints this morning that maybe WVU wasn't rejected after all. Now, CBS's Brett McMurphy is coming with a strong report back in the other direction:
Multiple Big East sources said they have been told by WVU officials that WVU rejected by ACC & SEC
This is third-hand information, but I trust the reporting that McMurphy and CBS in general does.
I proposed yesterday in several comment threads around the SBN network that if West Virginia applied to the SEC, it probably applied to the ACC as well. ACC commissioned John Swofford has said that 10 schools contacted his league about joining up, and we knew that at least one school (Villanova) has applied and not been accepted along with Pitt and Syracuse. You can add West Virginia to that list now.
It also goes to show that we are past the point where schools only apply to conferences if they know they're going to be accepted. The projected leftovers of the Big 12 and Big East are desperate, and they'll do whatever it takes to find a safe landing spot.
The SEC was right to reject WVU for now. For one thing, Texas A&M hasn't even officially entered the conference yet. It's a 12-school league now and in perpetuity if nothing changes. There's no way the SEC would take WVU before bringing the Aggies in the fold for good. For another, there are other candidates out there who likely will need to say no first before the league turns to WVU. Florida State, Virginia Tech, and possibly Missouri as well immediately come to mind.
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: the only school that is a potential candidate for SEC inclusion that it might not be able to get at any point in the future is Missouri. Really, that's a school the conference could take or leave because it could find comparable value elsewhere. All of its options are open, and nothing the Big Ten or Pac-12 will do can take away more than one of those options.
The SEC can and will take this slowly. It doesn't have any reason not to.