MORGANTOWN — (Editor’s note: On July 1, Ed Pastilong’s career as athletic director at West Virginia University comes to an end and Oliver Luck begins his career. Last week the outgoing A.D. sat down with the Times West Virginian for a long retrospective on his career. Here is Part I of the two-part series.)



Sometime later this week, Ed Pastilong will walk out of his big athletic director’s office and wander down the hallway on the second floor of the Coliseum to begin sharing office space with Garrett Ford, turning over in his retirement the athletic directorship at West Virginia University to Oliver Luck.

He will end a 21-year run as athletic director proudly, feeling no regret as moves into an emeritus role where he will serve Luck as an advisor.

“The only thing I would have liked to have done that we didn’t do is to have won a national championship in football or basketball,” he said.

WVU came close. It went into its final football game against Pittsburgh three years ago as a 24-point favorite, needing to win to get to the BCS championship game, only to lose and last year he saw coach Bob Huggins lead the Mountaineers to its first Final Four since 1959, falling to Duke in the national semifinal.

Pastilong’s run has been long and successful, a time of growth for the university and for the athletic department. It was a memorable near quarter century in WVU athletic history, a time of great success and of deflating failures, a time when West Virginia found a home in the Big East and when it was led by great coaches to spectacular moments.

Oddly, though, the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same is being proven here again, for as Luck takes command of the athletic department, he faces many of the same kinds of challenges that Pastilong faced when he replaced Fred Schaus as athletic director a couple of decades back.



The Conference Mess

Until a few months ago, WVU was secure with its place in college athletics, a major power in both football and basketball, a leader in the Big East Conference, respected for its ability to succeed in an area that is rural in nature and not exactly a great place to grow its own recruits.

Then word began to drift out that the Big Ten was going to expand, shaking the foundation of college athletics. The Big East was — and still is — in jeopardy, as is WVU’s athletics, which as a small television market offers little to conferences looking to run their own networks.

It is a challenge for Luck, just as Pastilong faced a challenge when he began in the job.

“Reflecting back 21 years ago, it was within a year after I got the job that Penn State went to the Big Ten and that disrupted the whole East,” Pastilong recalled.

Indeed, Penn State was one of two big money games for WVU, the Nittany Lions and Pitt. They were part of the foundation of Eastern football along with Syracuse and a few other schools.

“We had to regroup and put together a different structure,” Pastilong said.

And so they did. While many preached the end of Eastern football, it found a way to survive and flourish and in that, Pastilong says, is a lesson for Luck and for the rest of the schools who will be affected by conference realignment.

“Necessity sometimes promotes success,” he said. “Whenever a situation presents itself that’s different, rather than look at it as doom and gloom, look at it as an opportunity. My druthers would be the Big East continues as is and West Virginia and their neighbors aren’t faced with putting something else together or restructuring.”

But he knows that if the Big Ten takes Rutgers and Pitt or Syracuse, that it may come to that. Having been through it can only help Luck as walks into this tenuous situation.



The Big East

Pastilong spent a lot of times in meetings, either in conference rooms at various airports round the East or on the phone after Penn State joined the Big Ten.

“At that time the Big East basketball conference was having success,” he recalled. “We asked if they would manage us as we put together the Big East football conference. That was out of necessity, but it turned out to be pretty darn good because we all became familiar with each other.”

Timing, of course, is everything and at the time the networks were interested in what would be Big East football and basketball, which seemed to be a no-brainer.

“Us football schools went, ‘Duh,’” Pastilong recalls. “We said, ‘OK, provided it’s all together.’”

That, of course, was a problem. Some of the basketball playing schools in the Big East didn’t play football. Some of the football playing schools, like WVU and Temple, were not playing basketball in the Big East.

“We, the football schools, I remember we excused ourselves and went back outside the kitchen there at the Pittsburgh Marriott. We said let’s not discuss this too long. Let’s go back in and let it be known we very much like this opportunity but we have to be one solid group,” Pastilong recalled.

“We went back in and it was clear to the basketball schools and the conference personnel that this was a good opportunity, so we said ‘Let’s unite and form as one.’ That’s one of the most important days. It was very significant for West Virginia University’s athletic department.”

It seemed only a matter of time until WVU moved its basketball to the Big East, something it did in 1995.



Preparing to be A.D.

When Ed Pastilong took over as athletic director at WVU in 1989, it was the end of a long preparation for the job. It was not exactly as he had imagined it when he left WVU as a backup quarterback. His first job was as a football coach and teacher at Scott High in Boone County.

“I loved coaching,” he admits. “But it wasn’t long before I realized I wasn’t a good high school coach. I went 0 and 10.”

He laughs at the memory.

Following his time at Scott, his former college roommate, Donnie Young, moved up at Salem from assistant coach to head coach, replacing Dale Evans.

“Well, he called me and said ‘I need an assistant coach but I want to make sure he doesn’t know any more football than I do. You came to mind.’”

Pastilong again laughs as he talks about it, but he took the job.

He spent three years as Young’s assistant and then when Young was invited to coach at WVU, Pastilong became head football coach at Salem … and more.

“I was head football coach, head track coach and head tennis coach. The only thing I knew about coaching tennis was I had a driver’s license and could get the players to the matches. Those guys would line themselves up and the opposing coaches would get upset at me, they’d say ‘Hey, your best player is playing in the 3 spot.’ I’d say, ‘He is?’” Pastilong joked.

Dr. Leland Byrd was athletic director at West Virginia by this time and he was looking for an administrator to be involved with eligibility and compliance and recruiting, as well work studies and federal loans.

“At Salem, that’s your cup of tea,” Pastilong said.

And so he landed the job, working as an administrator and as a recruiting director for football coach Frank Cignetti.

When Dick Martin replaced Byrd, Pastilong was made assistant director for transportation and compliance while also working with facilities and game operations.

After WVU again switched athletic directors, this time to Fred Schaus, Pastilong was made associate athletic director.

“It’s interesting, all I ever wanted to do was be a high school football coach. As fate would have it, I coached in college, then fate took me to an administrator, then when Schaus resigned, I went ahead and applied for the job as athletic director.”

And he landed that job, too.

Don Nehlen

By the time Pastilong took over, Don Nehlen was well on his way to the Hall of Fame. He had coached the Mountaineers into the new stadium and into a national championship showdown with Notre Dame the year before Pastilong became athletic director.

“Don came within an inch of being national champion,” Pastilong said. “If Major Harris doesn’t get hurt, we win that game and are national champions.”

They played in the Fiesta Bowl and Harris, a Hall of Fame quarterback, was injured on the game’s third play. While he played the rest of the game, he did so with a bad shoulder that restricted what Nehlen could do with him.

As one might expect, the entire game plan was built around Major Harris and his unique skills. By the year 2000, however, Nehlen was about at the end of the road.

“First of all, let me say he was going to be our coach as long as he wanted to be our coach. He deserved that,” Pastilong said, indicating the decision was entire Nehlen’s.

He’d been troubled with a bad back all year and had warned Pastilong before the season that it might be his last.

As the season wore down, nothing happened to change that and as West Virginia went into a late-season game, facing Syracuse, Nehlen told Pastilong he would announce his retirement after the game.

As fate would have it, it was difficult struggle with Syracuse winning in the final seconds as Nehlen made a questionable coaching decision. When he announced his retirement after that, it came as a shock to the players, the media and the state, but not Pastilong.

“He’d made his mind up before the game,” Pastilong would say.

Enter Rodriguez

Rumors had circulated since the spring when Rich Rodriguez, a hot assistant coach at Clemson who had played at WVU and grown up in Grant Town, had been at spring practice and seen chatting with Gov. Joe Manchin, also from that area, that Rodriguez was in line to replace Nehlen.

Pastilong denies that, however.

“There was no contact with me then. If he had been around and let it be known he was interested, it wasn’t done in an improper way.”

But now Pastilong needed a coach and, he says, when that happens, well …

“When you start to hire a football or basketball coach, you get a lot of advice,” he said. “There was some discussion with one or two athletic council members, with the president and his advisors, talked to several coaches, visited several coaches, some visited us.”

Rodriguez’s name was an obvious one and while Pastilong says a real search was conducted, it is hard to imagine anyone but Rodriguez getting the job.

“There were a lot of people wanting him,” Pastilong said. “It was a popular hire, a good hire. It was a little bit of a risk, because he hadn’t been a head coach.”

In his first year, Rodriguez went 3-8.

“I got my fishing pole out,” Pastilong jokes.

But he wasn’t about to be fired and neither was Rodriguez, who had his contract extended after that turbulent first season.

“We went ahead and extended the contract then. I felt that was important. We had to show solidarity there and it paid off,” Pastilong said.

Indeed it did. WVU got better each year, right up until it stood on the verge of playing for a national championship. That’s when Pitt stunned the world, beating WVU at Mountaineer Field as a 24-point underdog.

“That was the worst loss and one of the worst things I’d ever seen happen to our department,” Pastilong said. “We’re playing Pitt at home and there’s no way we could lose that game.”

But lose they did and never did Patrick White or Steve Slaton get a shot at the national title.

“I was with the Sugar Bowl people, where the national championship game was going to be played. We were down on the field. I was looking up in the stands, standing there and it was the most sickening feeling in the world. I felt bad for the whole state. I was embarrassed for the Sugar Bowl people. I didn’t know what to say,” Pastilong said.

“I walked up to Law School hill, where they had parked and said goodbye to them, then I walked home. My wife, Mona, was driving and she hadn’t gotten home because of the traffic. I got there and didn’t have the key and house was locked, so I sat out on the back porch for about 45 minutes. Oh, it was terrible feeling.”

Here was Ed Pastilong, locked out of his own house, alone on the porch, the night the sky fell in.

TOMORROW: Hiring Bill Stewart and Bob Huggins, dropping sports and building facilities.

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