West Virginia eschewed independent assistanceand, just shy of eight weeks after confirming longtime Director of Athletics Ed Pastilong would gallop into emeritus status June 30, introduced its “screening committee.” 

“We are first looking at credentials and resumes,” Clements said, “and then will begin the process of conducting interviews to find the very best leader for our successful athletic program.”

“The search is under way,” said Professor Samuel Ameri, who will chair the committee, “and an important part of the review process will be maintaining confidentiality for the candidates.” Any future information will be released through News and Information.

That step is complete. There’s a Web site devoted entirely to the search. Committee members are not to spoken to about the search.

That’s a bummer. Oh, I get it. The less people talk, the less information is gleaned or leaked. The more people are subjected to questions, the more you risk compromising the search. But if those people can’t keep a secret, which absolutely is their duty, then should this be their duty in the first place?

Still, an interesting collection of committee members: a chair who is an esteemed academician, a financial officer who’s the chair-elect of the alumni association’s BOD, the president and CEO of the WVU Foundation, an administrative assistant who once won and has since judged Mountaineer Idol and three people from the athletic department … and only one item from that list seems amiss.

Irregardless — I’m assuming new eyes won’t recognize that’s an old joke — the gag order kept us under wraps yesterday and that’s a shame. After football practice, we werent’ able to quiz assistant coach Lonnie Galloway about his appointment, responsibilities, vision of a candidate, etc. Seemed a grand honor to me and something in which he might revel. Oh, and seeing as if there’s a clear link between Galloway’s employment vehicle and his yet-undetermined boss, it’s too bad he can’t share what he’ll look at when screening.

What of Nikki Izzo-Brown? Certainly one of the most accomplished and most respected coaches in school history — and, just as sure, you could expand the scope beyond that — she’s built a program from its conception to what is now 10 straight NCAA Tournament appearances. She knows of the needed commitment to the Olympic sports and what it takes to keep good coaches in place to do great things. So she definitely has an eye for the qualifications and clearly there will come a time when the new A.D. will be confronted by an issue common to the sustained success of so-called small sports. Wouldn’t it be nice to have view of this preliminary process from someone whose future could one day be shaped by the new boss she helped select?

And then there’s Patrick Hairston, the assistant A.D. for compliance. That’s a headline job of late, though for all the wrong reasons and, to be completely fair to Hairston, for things that happened before his time at WVU. Yet whoever Hairston screens and one day becomes the director of the athletic department will have to decide who he/she hires/keeps as part of his department. It might have been fun to pick the brain of a person helping to hire someone who will one day organize/reorganize the department in which he works.  

Oh well. In the meantime, keep refreshing that Web page.