MORGANTOWN — Normally, when you come in and take over an athletic program, be it as a coach or an administrator, it is in need of a quick fix, which may be why Oliver Luck on this day is far overdressed in a blue blazer, gray slacks and a blue tie with what seems like 25,000 or so gold flying WVs on it.

See, one week into his administration, replacing Eddie Pastilong, who had become something of an institution in 21 years on the job, Luck has learned that he doesn’t exactly have to roll up his sleeves, get out the hammer and saw and begin patching the leaky ship.

As he puts it in a conversation that lasts almost 40 minutes, “The good news is there’s no fire in the kitchen. Eddie left the department in good shape.”

While there is no fire in the kitchen, that is not to say there aren’t clouds of smoke off in the horizon, for if timing is everything that Luck takes over at a time when change is in the air, not a change anyone asked for, but one that seems inevitable.

And if it comes, this reshuffling of the conference landscape in college athletics, Luck vows that he and West Virginia will be ready to react, be it by strengthening the Big East or by being attractive bait to a conference looking to expand.

“There are two things we have to do,” Luck begins as the talk turns toward conference expansion. “One, we have to work our tail off to make this institution as attractive as it can be. We have to increase our revenues, increase our success, graduate more student athletes. We have to set aside wherever we’re playing, if we’re playing in the ‘Perimeter League’ it doesn’t matter. We have to make ourselves more attractive. That has to be our focus.”

OK, so you have been the top football power in the Big East since the ACC raided and stole away Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech after the 2003 season. OK, you have raised a record amount of money through your fundraising this year. OK, you went to the Final Four and finished 37th in the Director’s Cup, which measures the strength of the overall department.

That, Luck expects, is a starting place, not the finish line.

But there is more as this conference thing unwinds, and Luck fully anticipates more to come from the Big Ten in the future.

“The second thing is we have to monitor our situation really closely. We have to touch base with a lot of people in other conferences. We have to speculate ‘What if?’ People talk about a decision tree with a lot of branches. We have shrubs where we just don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.

That is a strong statement in one regard, a statement that indicates there will at least be cursory investigations into other conference affiliations, just in case looks to see where WVU stands, where it could go if the bottom were to fall out and what it must do to get there in that case.

Nothing is certain.

“I don’t know anyone who would have said the first school to leave a conference would have been Colorado. Who would have said that?” he said. “The point is, you don’t know where these things are going to come from. The Big Ten could go about this extraordinarily quietly. They’ll send a letter to University XYZ inviting them to join. They’ll quietly hold a meeting and you wake up one morning and find that University X is the Big Ten.”

Like a Boy Scout, Luck believes West Virginia must be prepared.

That means improving every aspect of the job. Some coaches and administrators may not like it, but whereas there has been great continuity in the WVU program, there will be a review. In most cases, that continuity is a good thing.

But not all.

“We have to grow in every facet of the term. We have to grow financially, as we have. We have to grow in terms of our success on the field, all sports. There are some sports where we’ve been mediocre, average, and I don’t think we can afford that,” he said.

Luck understands that West Virginia has to keep up with Jones ... such as Butch Jones, the football coach at Cincinnati. Even if you are king of the hill, there’s always people coming at you from all sides and you must figure a way to fight them off.

“We still have a ways to go to match what some of our peers are doing. One of the big questions I probably will ask is, ‘What are our peer institutions doing?’” he said. “The peers will be the Big East schools, especially in football. I don’t think what Marquette does has much effect on us. I’m talking about schools like Syracuse and Rutgers and Louisville.

“And I like to see what is Virginia Tech doing. I have an affinity for Tech because we played them every year and had a great rivalry. They strike me as very similar schools, both in small college towns and had great success over the last 20 years.”

Luck will not stop there, either.

“I’ll ask folks, ‘Tell me what Ohio State is doing.’ That may not be a peer institution — they’re much larger and they’ve got 30-some sports — but it’s important for us to know what Ohio State is doing. If we really want to be able to compete at the highest level we have to know how they do things,” Luck continued.

“I fortunately have friends at Texas, another juggernaut. I can call them and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing about volleyball? Do you think we’re not spending enough money for it to be successful?’ How do they do it with women’s soccer at Texas A&M, which has had some great teams?”

So while things are not broken, Luck isn’t about to just sit back and earn a salary by baby-sitting it. He understands that if you stand still you are going backward.

One area that will draw his attention is a controversial one, involving the radio rights now being handled in-house as MSNSportsnet. The university produces its own radio broadcasts and there have been boosters who want to sell those rights, believing they can pick up as much as $6 million more by so doing.

“There’s no question over the last 15 or 20 years many schools have taken their media rights and farmed them out,” Luck said. “There’s a host of companies out there that do that. I think there are some unique facets of what we have here in terms of our state demographics and our basically small population. There are some differences.

“The only thing I can tell you is at some point I will sit down with our staff and go through an objective review of the Mountaineer Sports Network and what other schools are doing and come to a determination of whether this is the best way to go forward. It has served us well, however, so there is no fire in the kitchen.”

Luck comes well equipped to face these problems, his background having been in professional sports, be it soccer in Houston or the NFL Europe. If there is any change from when he played quarterback at West Virginia it is that college athletics has become run far more like the professional leagues.

“When I look at documents and budgets and see where the WVU program has gone since when I was a freshman in 1978. it’s unbelievable. The growth is really unbelievable,” he said. “In many ways it’s become more similar to the professional side. Now, you can have a spirited debate with a bunch of people where that’s good or bad but it doesn’t matter. That’s the reality.”

But a line must be drawn, too.

“At the same time, we have to temper the professional aspect somewhat because we are in a collegiate environment. Our first obligation is to the university, to get the student athletes through school and give them a meaningful degree,” Luck said.

“That will always separate us from the professional sports.”

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