MORGANTOWN — Ed Pastilong sits in his office on the second level of the Coliseum, a large room dominated by a conference table that sits empty, surrounded by walls decorated with pictures of a lifetime of achievement at West Virginia University.

He sits there as a lame duck, an outgoing athletic director. He would prefer to stay on, having announced his retirement when the university was in turmoil during Mike Garrison’s brief rein as president of the school, a troubled time when a power play seemed ready to force Pastilong out the door.

It was a complicated situation, one growing out of a split among athletic boosters who felt Pastilong wasn’t maximizing revenue through the school’s radio network, among other things. The fact that Pastilong refused to give in to contract demands from football coach Rich Rodriguez, leading to his defection to Michigan, also added hard feelings.

So now, with the school standing at a crossroads with the Big East being threatened by Big Ten expansion and in need of strong, experienced leadership, Pastilong is in his final weeks as athletic director, about to end 22 years of success.

o “You think back and coming out of Moundsville High I had some scholarship offers for football. I remember saying, ‘I’m from West Virginia. I’m going to West Virginia.’ It wasn’t really complicated,” he said.

It never is when you are young. But as the years pass, the decisions you make seem to be more and more complicated, more difficult and more important, affecting far more people than yourself, and so it would be with Ed Pastilong.

But back then, it was just a matter of picking a school that would shape the rest of his life.

“I thought, ‘Wow! If I could just graduate.’ Then I graduated and it was ‘Wow! I just want to go back to the area I came from and coach.”

And that’s what he did. He became Coach Pastilong. He was happy, content.

“Then Donnie Yong called me. He had just become coach at Salem and he wanted me to be an assistant to him there. I spent nine great years.”

Again he was happy, content when Leland Byrd, the athletic director, called.

He was looking for an assistant, someone familiar with compliance, financial aid and coaching.

“As an assistant at a small school like Salem you learn all that,” Pastilong said.

So he accepted the job thinking, “If could just work my way into being as assistant athletic director it would be really neat.”

Next thing you, an assistant athletic director left and Pastilong got the job.

“That wasn’t complicated, either,” he said.

Fred Schaus became athletic director and not long after that Bob Goin, who would go on to be Bob Huggins’ athletic director at Cincinnati, left his job as associate athletic director.

“I was already doing three or four jobs. I thought, what the heck. I applied,” Pastilong said.

Next thing you know, he’s associate athletic director and when Schaus left 22 years ago, he became the athletic director.

He was happy, content … for about five minutes.

Then the nightmares began.

o “My first nightmare came along and Penn State went to the Big Ten,” he said, lending credence to the phrase, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That broke up the independent association that had been formed. Something dramatic had to be done.

Strangely, Penn State had earlier applied for admission to the Big East and was turned down, missing by one vote.

“The A.D.s were calling each other. That’s when they put together the Big East football conference,” Pastilong said, recalling that the football conference began in 1991.

By 1995, WVU was brought into the full conference as a basketball playing member, something Pastilong had lobbied hard for from the time they went in to play football. Sometimes, though, getting what you wish is not the best of things, as he would find out.

“The second nightmare was ‘The Raid,’” he said, referring to the Atlantic Coast Conference’s stealing away Boston College, Virginia Tech and Miami. At the same time, Temple left the Big East because it could not compete.

All that seemingly killing the football conference.

“Everyone was preaching doom, but we put together a very good plan,” he said, referring to himself, then President David Hardesty, the other athletic directors and presidents and the Big East Conference. “We really didn’t skip a beat.”

They added Connecticut in football, South Florida, Cincinnati and Louisville to the mix, making a competitive football conference that kept its Florida roots while turning the basketball conference into a monster.

Things were going along smoothly.

Then another threat to the existence of the conference and the future of the WVU athletic program arose.

“Now, the third nightmare is in front of us,” Pastilong admitted, referring to the Big Ten’s expressed desire to expand, possibly raiding the Big East again. “The worst part is we have to wait to see what the Big Ten does. People say we should act before they do anything, but that’s impossible.”

o West Virginia would not be in this position today were it not for the way Pastilong brought it along under his leadership over 22 years.

He had vision.

“When I took the job, the first thing I wanted to do was win a national championship in a major sport,” he said. “I thought we had it when we lost to Pitt in football a couple of years back. We’re 20-point favorites, at home. And I thought we had it when we beat Kentucky to get to the Final Four this year.”

Neither would come to be.

The basis for what Pastilong built here is summed up in the acronym CAPS, something he put together on a legal pad when he first got the job.

They letters stand for Compliance, Academics, Performance and Support.

The program under Pastilong has been clean, although he leaves with the NCAA snooping around to see if Rich Rodriguez might not have been a rogue coach. The program is graduating student-athletes at a rate better than the general university. The performance you have seen on the field and the support through staff and facilities continues to grow.

It is hard to imagine, but wrestling has moved from a room to a building, gymnastics has its own gymnasium, a new soccer field has been built and a practice field will join it this year, the football team has an indoor facility, to say nothing of the suites that have been added at Milan Puskar Stadium, and the gem is yet to come in a facility to house the men’s and women’s basketball programs on the Coliseum site.

All of that took place under Pastilong, while WVU continued to be one of 14 Division I schools claiming to be completely self-supporting.

That made fund-raising perhaps the most important part of Pastilong’s job. It certainly is an area where he has stood tall throughout the years. He is a schmoozer and a great socialize.

He also has always had the ear of one of the university’s great benefactors, Milan Puskar.

“Thirty-six years ago I ran into him a location both he and I frequented,” Pastilong said. “From that point on, we became very good friends and the friendship is unique.”

How unique?

“He was bringing Mylan Pharmaceuticals at that time. I wish I’d bought stock in it 36 years ago,” Pastilong said. “When I became athletic director I said I wanted to use the principles that he used to run his company as the way I ran the department. And when I asked him about it, what he told me was to trust your people. I never forgot that and I try to follow that. People must take pride in their work.”

The company grew and Puskar became a wealthy man and Pastilong’s athletic department grew and succeeded, until a few years back when it hit a major bump in the road.

“We were experiencing some financial stress and undergoing some coaching changes,” Pastilong recalled. “He called me and asked me to come over.”

When Pastilong arrived, Puskar informed him that he was going to make a large contribution to the school and he wanted most of it to go the athletic department, Pastilong recalled.

“We talked it over and I explained my desire to make sure that the Athletic Scholarship Fund was taken care of,” Pastilong said. “I explained to him that we had a large bill that needed to be erased. He erased it right there.”

Puskar’s gift to the university was $20 million, the largest it had ever received.

“His generosity propelled us to what we are right now,” Pastilong said.

o Pastilong has followed Puskar’s direction in running his department.

He has 250 employees and 500 student-athletes, many of them long-time employees. He turns them loose and lets them do their work.

“Tammy Cavender is a one-person travel agency,” Pastilong said, referring to the coordinator of travel. “During the NCAA Tournament, she was moving hundreds of people daily, getting them from one big city to another without much notice.

“And Debby Travinski, she moved thousands and thousands of tickets through the ticket office in a two or three-day period,” Pastilong continued. “Then there was Russ Sharp (who recently died while working right up until the end). He was one of the most knowledgeable people in the business.

“Mike Parsons (associate athletic director) handles one of the most unique set ups in the Mountaineer Sports Network. The Big Ten may have their TV network, but our radio network gives us what we want. We can promote and control our broadcasts.”

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.