Not to break up the bashing WVU party but I am not sure this article tells the whole story. Yearly budgets can fluxuate quite a bit for many reasons like buyouts on coaches contracts, large scale facilitiy upgrade proejcts, etc... My understanding of the Big 12 is that they ultimately pay for travel expenses, not the individual schools. Many schools travel long distances in their conferences as these modern conferences span from Mssachusets to Miami, WVU to Lubbock, Jersey to Nebraska, Connecticut to Texas and Florida, etc...
Schools in C-USA and AAC have huge travel expenses as well but don't have a huge payout to show for all that travel. Clearly WVU can afford to travel to Big 12 destinations if all these other schools can as well.
Heck UConn has some pretty big travel to many of the AAC schools, is UConn having trouble affording the travel to places like DFW, Houston, and Florida? How is Uconn flying to games with TCU, Houston, UCF, USF, etc.. any different than WVY flying to games in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa? IF Uconn joined the ACC you would still have long travel to Clemson, GaTEch, FSU, Maimi. B1G you still travel to Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc... Ultimtely most of these long distance games are simply a few more minutes on a plane than mid distance travel destinations unless you get into multiple connections.
WVU did what any school stuck in a non power conference does when a power conference comes calling. They started nodding their head and asked when they can start playing in the Big 12. I'd like to see the Big 12 consider adding UConn and Cinci to get us back to 12 teams. Would get us some nice TV markets and recruiting in Ohio. Go back to 8 conference games and North South divisions. We would have a well balanced league in FB and BB along with strong WBB as well. Get us back to playing a CCG as well which would offset any loss from splitting the pie 12 ways.