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20 June 2010
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.
Luck will acquire what he termed "full authority" July 1, but won't be set up in his office for full-time functionality until 2011. The Houston Dynamo, a Major League Soccer franchise for which he is the president and general manager, is building a stadium and Luck wants to see it through.
The reason for Monday's slight delay?
Well, there was a good deal of glad-handing and reuniting as Luck made his way around the room, but in a neat twist the current athletic director, Ed Pastilong, was running a little behind and it was Luck who would have to wait on him.
Pastilong, who enters a two-year "emeritus" position July 1 and will be something of a supplemental AD until Luck's takeover, hurried in at 1:32 p.m.
Luck eventually took to the dais and met with the media for questions and answers - although it was more like questions and more questions and no real answers.
That's nothing against Luck.
He just can't answer a lot of the questions put to him - and there are many. First and foremost, it seems, is how Luck will divvy his duties and when WVU will have a full-time leader in an absolutely critical period.
The plan is to travel a forked road for six months and satisfy split allegiances.
Houston and Harris County, Texas, each have agreed to fund $10 million of about $80 million needed to build the stadium, as well as the land on which it will sit. Luck is negotiating with the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority that he used to run for a lease agreement.
In the meantime, college conferences are waxing and waning at a pace no one can predict, and the Mountaineers and the people who pay fortunes either financially, emotionally or both to support them would appreciate knowing the musket is on the pulse of the happenings.
