VIENNA-Spring drills are over - ditto for the annual summer camps - but recruiting has become a full-time job for West Virginia University head football coach Bill Stewart and his assistants.

The third-year leader of the Mountaineers was back in Wood County Tuesday playing golf and talking football with members of the local chapter of the 1100 Club at the Parkersburg Country Club

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - A press conference at Milan Puskar Stadium's Touchdown Terrace on Monday was not to announce Oliver Luck's hiring as West Virginia's new athletic director, but to welcome him home.

The formality was handled last Thursday. This was the festivity.

This celebration began at 1:33 p.m., just three minutes off schedule, which hardly seems worth noting. Then again, we must get used to waiting.

MORGANTOWN - Luring Oliver Luck back to his alma mater as West Virginia's athletic director wasn't as much about offering him the job as it was convincing him to take it.

He was far and away the most appealing and desirable candidate from the start, even more so than when he was recruited to play quarterback for the Mountaineers in 1978, and it took some sweet-talking.

Of the other four other most prominent "media-mentioned candidates" - former WVU quarterback and current Board of Governor's member Oliver Luck, Jim Schaus of Ohio U., Missouri's Whit Babcock and Kentucky's Rob Mullens - Luck has gotten the most attention.

MORGANTOWN — Oliver Luck won’t be West Virginia University’s next director of athletics.

“Nothing has changed,” the former Academic All-America quarterback told me on Thursday via telephone. “I couldn’t be interested in that position at this time.”

Luck’s name has appeared among candidates for the athletic director position in some publications. But he never officially sought the job Ed Pastilong is vacating June 30 after 21 years.

MORGANTOWN — There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

A guy is wandering around Times Square in New York City, obviously lost. He stops a guy who looks like he knows his way around Manhattan.

“Hey, buddy, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” he asks.

The New Yorker looks at him incredulously, and answers:

“Practice, practice, practice.”

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - For really the first time since he became West Virginia's offensive coordinator in 2008, Jeff Mullen has finally got several players well-versed in his way of doing things.

Of those expected to be on the offensive two-deep this fall, 15 players have at least a year of playing experience in Mullen's system including 10 with two year's worth of experience (that does not include Geno Smith, who took about 200 snaps last year as Jarrett Brown's backup QB). One of those two-year veterans is junior wide receiver Brad Starks, who admits the learning curve for Mullen's offense can be pretty steep for some players.

The word from both schools is that they plan to sit out any wave of conference reconfiguration triggered by the Big Ten's prospective expansion. The Irish prefer to stay independent in football. The Longhorns say they're committed to the Big 12. Athletics directors at both schools nonetheless acknowledge their resolve could soften if change is momentous — say the Big Ten expands to 16 schools and the Southeastern follows suit — and both programs are faced with being left out of a newly defined upper tier of college sports.

"It's not something we have to think about. It's something we are thinking about," says Texas' DeLoss Dodds.