Big East Moves To Dismiss WVU Lawsuit

• {Morgantown,  West Virginia}...Monday, lawyers for the Big East moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed in Morgantown in which the West Virginia University Mountaineers want to quit the conference immediately, rather than waiting 27 months, to join the Big 12 in time for the 2012 season. WVU argues the conference had violated its fiduciary responsibility to members by failing to balance the number of football-playing and non-football schools. But the Big East says the bylaws have no such responsibility, so WVU can't challenge them on that front. The bylaws do, however, require WVU to stay in the conference until July 2014. The Big East contends WVU should be required to abide by the rules that it helped draft and repeatedly agreed to and says, if they don't, it's the conference, not WVU, that would suffer "irreparable harm." WVU is set to respond with its own filings by Friday.