West Virginia Cornerback Competition Heats Up As Iowa Transfer Maurice Fleming Arrives

Welcome, By-Godders, to the Shotgun/Throwdown: WVU's best place for sports links, information, sophomoric humor and daily distractions.

Football:

University of Iowa transfer Maurice Fleming arrived in Morgantown on Tuesday looking for a starting job with the Mountaineers, but there are plenty of seniors in defensive coordinator Tony Gibson's secondary hoping to beat him to it this fall, including Nana Kyeremeh who has seemingly been around as long as the mountains surrounding Morgantown.

Most Big 12 football programs have begun taking their nonconference scheduling seriously, except of course at Baylor, where larger issues—like treating students with basic, human decorum—are commanding more attention. In today's Gold & Blue Lunch Report, Allan Taylor ranks the league's out-of-conference schedules for this season. Where does West Virginia measure up to the rest of the Big 12 conference?

Basketball:

Drawing 10,583 fans per home game last season, West Virginia ranked 39th nationally in men's basketball attendancefor a second consecutive year, according to the NCAA compilation released Wednesday. The Mountaineers, whose average crowd increased by 394 over the previous year, were fifth in Big 12 attendance behind No. 9 Kansas, No. 16 Iowa State, No. 26 Texas and No. 32 Kansas State.

West Virginia Athletics:

West Virginia's Alan Cooke maintained the lead entering the final round of the West Virginia Amateur on Thursday on the Old White TPC. Cooke currently sets two strokes ahead of defending champion Sam O'Dell.

Jon Ransone, a rising West Virginia junior member of coach Sean Covich's golf team, made his way to the final qualifier for the U.S. Open this Saturday, only to have a pair of 78s come up and kick him in the butt at Ohio's Springfield Country Club.

Around The Big XII:

Just a couple months ago, Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops wasn't too enthused about the idea of playing a conference championship game in a 10-team Big 12. But Tuesday night at the Sooner Caravan at the OU-Tulsa Schusterman Center, Stoops said he was in favor of the idea.

When Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby announced Friday that the conference could split up into two divisions to support the return of the conference title game in 2017, he did all of us in the content business a big favor. There's no easy, obvious, consensus way to divvy up the Big 12 into five-team groups, so ESPN spent a lot of time dreaming up some rather exciting solutions.

Around The NCAA:

Georgia Tech was young and massively banged up last year. The Yellow Jackets have experience this time around, but is the talent there? SB Nation's Bill Connelly previews the Yellow Jackets on his way through every Division I FBS football team.

Now that we know the all the players who are and aren't leaving college early for the NBA Draft, SB Nation has reevaluated their super early 2016-17 top 25 from the moments immediately following Villanova's national championship victory over North Carolina. There are a couple of newcomers and a whole lot of shaking up, but the three names at the top remain the same.

After last week's debacle where EDSBS' readers accidentally selected the worst slate of teams possible to preview for 2016, Spencer and the guys took matters into their own hands. This week they preview five teams that could not only be very good this year, but who could also theoretically win things and be fun to watch and stuff.

In the latest Podcast Ain't Played Nobody, Bill and Godfrey talk about Conference USA's cruddy TV deal (and decision-making), cable cord-cutting options, a BracketBuster Saturday, Duke in 5 years, and ditching divisions in the era of 14-team conferences.

Today's Miss Throwdown is a fashion blogger and Playboy's Miss July 2011. CLICK HERE for Jessa Hinton's Instagram.