MORGANTOWN — As West Virginia University athletic director Oliver Luck noted as he was making the announcement on Friday morning that the West Virginia University most valuable football player each year would be placed on a plague in the football offices and forever been known as the winner of the Ed Pastilong Football MVP Award, he noted that it was a good thing his predecessor as AD had taken the career path he did.

There was a time, see, when Ed Pastilong was a high school football coach in Boone County.

“Folks in Boone County still talk about your perfect record — 0-10,” Luck noted, bringing a laugh from the large gathering that had come to honor Pastilong, but none laughing harder than Pastilong himself.

“Eddie was a much better AD than he was a football coach,” Luck concluded.

And that was why everyone was in the football office at Milan Puskar Stadium, for over 20 years Pastilong had taken WVU’s athletic department and reshaped it and rebuilt it, taking its budget from $20 million to $64 million and putting it on the nation’s athletic map as one of the top programs in the country.

Interestingly enough, much of the praise that was being heaped upon Pastilong was for how he managed the finances while tripling the budget, this being a year when President Barack Obama is being torn apart for doing the same thing with the country … but, of course, he never had Major Harris, Pat White, Kevin Pittsnogle, Greg Jones of Pat Itanyi to show for it.

Being honored as he was made it a time for Pastilong to reflect on where the program was when he took over and where it went under his guidance, which requires first a brief look at his background as it truly had a strong effect on how he performed his job.

Pastilong was from Moundsville and recalls that he was a quarterback who was recruited nationally.

“I had opportunities to go to other colleges, but I chose West Virginia because it was my home state, and I never left the state of West Virginia,” he said proudly.

He taught and coached at Boone County upon graduating, did the same at Salem College and then was given a chance to join the athletic administration at WVU.

“I would have walked back to take that job,” he admitted.

Things weren’t great in athletics when he arrived, and as he grew on the job, he had some opportunities to leave … good opportunities.

“I never entertained them, and I never responded in a way that they had further discussions,” he said. “This was my state, my university, the one I attended, the one I graduated from, the one that gave me employment and the one I was happy to work for.

“The nice part about it is I finished up here, and I feel good about it.”

That kind of loyalty has gone the way of top hats and high-top football shoes.

He spent a number of years learning the ropes before being offered the athletic director’s job.

“Fortunately, I had worked here 10 to 12 years prior to Mr. (Fred) Schaus retiring. I had worked for Dr. Leland Byrd and I had worked for Gene Corum during his interim athletic director experience and I had worked for Dick Martin. I had a great opportunity to watch several people direct the athletic department,” he said.

“I felt when I asked for the position I was capable of doing it.”

And then he got the job.

“The first day I walked in I learned it was one thing to ask for a job and another thing to know the enormity of it and sit in the chair and think you will be making some decisions that affect a lot of people, a lot of alums and the university. To be honest, there were a few days during the first few weeks I didn’t sleep a full eight hours,” he said.

But before long he was deeply immersed in getting the university athletic program on the right track when maybe the biggest challenge he would ever face came up.

“The second year I was athletic director, we were given the charge of being self-supporting,” he recalled. “Prior to that we had several hundred scholarships that were funded by the university. Now we had to fund them, so we had to go immediately into a funding process and started the athletic endowment fund, and we put a tremendous emphasis on our supporters to fund the scholarships.”

That endowment fund is strong.

“We went from $20 million to $64 million budget, and at no time were we ever a strain on the state of West Virginia or the university. There’s only eight schools in the country that can make that statement, and we are one of those and we’re very proud of that,” he said.

Often overlooked in discussions about Pastilong’s success as an athletic director is the facilities growth at WVU under him. There are nearly no athletic facilities on campus that he didn’t have something to do with building, and many of them he was running the department, including the new basketball facility and the football stadium and offices.

“Ed spearheaded WVU’s growth into one of the finest athletic programs on and off the playing field during his 20-year tenure as athletic director,” Luck said. “During his tenure Eddie directed more than $65 million facility renovations. Don’t overlook that he initiated the Athletic Director’s Academic Honor Roll, more than 4,000 recognized for their schoolwork.”

And he also spearheaded the move of WVU into the Big East, its first venture into a major conference affiliation.

Now he will be remembered forever — or at least for the 75 years it will take to fill the MVP plague — for his contributions to the school and to the state that he loves so dearly.

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com or follow him on Twitter @bhertzel.