Luck-y day

BLUEFIELD — Time are a-changin’ in college football.

Oliver Luck understands that well. That’s why the recent NCAA allegations against the West Virginia football team did not sit well with him.

“I was upset because we should be doing a better job,” said Luck, who took over for Ed Pastilong as West Virginia’s athletic director on July 1.

“Things are in good shape, by and large,” added Luck. “I can tell you that after 45 days, things aren’t perfect, but things are really in pretty good shape.”

Luck wasn’t pleased when the West Virginia football team was recently charged with five major and one secondary violation. Luck said an NCAA hearing on the matter won’t happen until February.

The department was proactive on the matter, even self-reporting themselves to the NCAA.

“We have already made some changes. We have made two significant personnel changes to address those things,” Luck said. “We don’t just wait to go through a hearing and then see what the NCAA says.

“Where we believe we have made a mistake, we have gone ahead and made changes already.”

Luck spoke on many subjects on Thursday, visiting the Bluefield Elks Lodge as part of a nine-city, three-day tour of West Virginia, being called “Summer Blitz with Oliver Luck.”

He was joined by former West Virginia athletes Quincy Wilson, Darius Nichols and Meghan Morris, along with coaches Mike Carey and Linda Burdette-Good, and several members of the Mountaineer Athletic Club.

Bluefield was one of four stops on Thursday, with Logan next on the list.

“This blitz is the one of the best trips I have ever had,” said Morris, a former standout gymnast for the Mountaineers. “We were just talking about how great it was to come to different places...

“To be able to go to Logan, I mean when are the Mountaineers ever in Logan. To be able to do that has just been a great experience. We love coming out, we love seeing everyone supporting us and be able to give back to them and talk to them and let them know how much we appreciate them.”

That support is vital to West Virginia, which Luck said is one of just 14 self-sufficient programs in Division I football — largely financed through the Mountaineer Athletic Club — with the lone exception being a $100,000 stipend from the state to support the nationally-ranked rifle team.

“As we go into these very unchartered waters of college realignment, it is very important that we can say that our financial house is in order,” said Luck, who is a member of the WVU Sports Hall of Fame. “I can guarantee it is a focus of mine and it will be in order down the road.”

Among the topics touched on by Luck was the ‘10 days that shook college football’ in the spring when schools such as Nebraska, Colorado and Utah switched conferences.

While Luck calls the Big East ‘the best basketball conference in the country’, the reality is the league needs help on the gridiron.

“As a football conference with only eight members, there are some great teams in the Big East, and I think we are undervalued, underrespected...,” Luck said. “We have a good conference, but we only have eight teams and that is a little bit of a sore spot for a lot of people, myself included, because it makes us worry about the future.

“We are committed to the Big East and we want to see the Big East improve, but we also have to realize what is happening in the bigger college football world.”

Being sure that West Virginia will have a landing spot if needed is one reason Luck wants to maintain a program that is not only strong financially, but also prepared for what many feels will be an eventual ‘reshuffling of the deck ‘ in terms of college football alignment.

“It is crucially important that we are viewed as a university and an athletic department as solid, as worthy and able to compete, whether it is the ACC, the SEC or who knows what may come down the pike in the future,” Luck said. “That is also one of the reasons why it is important for us to run a very clean program with a stellar reputation and for all of our sports to perform well and for all of our athletes to perform well on the field and in the classroom.”

Luck did both while at West Virginia. He played quarterback for the Mountaineers, and was a finalist as a Rhodes Scholar. He spent four seasons with the Houston Oilers of the NFL and then served tenures in executive positions with the NFL, NFL Europe and World Football League, along with Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamos.

He returned to West Virginia in July as the 11th athletic director for the Mountaineers. He calls WVU the ‘flagship institution’ in the state, calling it the ‘most important institution in the state with all due respect to (Marshall).’

“Our athletic teams represent more than just the university. When any of our student-athletes put on a jersey with West Virginia on it, they are out there representing not just our school, but the entire state,” Luck said.

“From the northern panhandle over to Martinsburg and down to southern West Virginia, we represent the hard working good quality people of this state. Not many other quality institutions across the country can say that.”

It’s for that reason, among others, that Luck is committed to making sure WVU is doing things the right way in Morgantown, adding that his office is taking any NCAA allegations ‘very serious’, with a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy in place.

“We want to win ... but we want to win in the right way because we represent not just the university, but we represent the entire state,” Luck said. “We want to win with the values — I consider them traditional West Virginia values of hard work, of integrity and persistence.

“We want to have a stellar reputation academically, we want to run a clean program, but we also want to win. Our job is to give our coaches the resources to be very, very competitive and to win as many games as we can.”

Luck also spoke of his desire for the Mountaineers attain a ratio of 75/20 in terms of graduation rate and being ranked among the top 20 programs in America in every sport.

Once again, that type of consistency will only dividends in the future.

“That is going to help us as others look at West Virginia University and where we may need to be down the road,” said Luck, who has four children, including Heisman Trophy candidate Andrew Luck, a quarterback at Stanford. “That is very important for us to make sure we are doing all we can...

“It’s almost like a sacred trust and we have to live up to that trust, respect the tradition, but continue to try and achieve excellence, and our mission is athletic and academic excellence,”

While Luck appreciates the long history of athletic excellence at West Virginia, he certainly isn’t living in the past.

“We respect those traditions absolutely and that is what makes us special,” Luck said, “but we are going to look to the future because we have a whole new generation of Mountaineers in Morgantown that many of us experienced there as students.

“That is very special to keep that tradition going. We want to make sure we respect the past, but we’re not afraid of the future. In fact we are embracing the future and trying to build as good a program as we possibly can.”

Luck, who is from Cleveland, Ohio, is glad to be back at West Virginia. He even got a few laughs when he commented on the Mountaineers’ biggest rival on any athletic venue.

“You know what ‘Pitt’ means to West Virginia,” Luck said. “I hate even saying that word.”

Note: More on Wilson, Nichols and Morris later this week in the Daily Telegraph.

—Contact Brian Woodson at bwoodson@bdtonline.com

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