There are two ways to look at the two most recent additions to WVU’s football program. Dana Holgorsen and Oliver Luck didn’t put tremendous emphasis on the college football pasts of Daron Roberts and Alex Hammond, but did project great things about their college football futures.

“In today’s world, there are different paths,” he said. “I remember the olden days when I was playing football, you came out of school, got a graduate assistant job and then you coached. I think today the world is different, quite honestly.

“Look at Alex and Daron’s resumes. They’re smart people. I think in college sports over the years it was common to try to hire more experienced people. Now I think you try to hire smart people who can grow with their position and aren’t tapped out after six months or so.

Yet these are certainly non-traditional decisions, though you do have to wonder if the so-called tradition is changing …

We’ve already chronicled the approach Roberts took to recruiting and the success it has thus far generated. Hammond is, by definition, the coordinator of recruiting operations, which is different than the recruiting coordinator.

His job will go well beyond answering questions about the number of cornerbacks the Mountaineers might take and what coaches will recruit what regions. That’s part of it, I suppose, but he’ll do nothing in the realm of choosing the types and the number of players WVU pursues. He’ll be monitoring the process, which figures to feature more analysis and detail than before, and then organizing and cataloging all of the information.

The larger recruiting duty will rest in managing the smaller aspects, like making sure the team’s facilities are fresh and impressive for recruiting visits. Basically, he’ll be charged with making sure the entire WVU experience — be it games, facilities, camps, social media, whatever constitutes or contributes to football recruiting — is in the most presentable state.

And then WVU will also add on top of that a critical role in compliance, something he got to know very well as an employee of the NCAA.

If it sounds like a lot, know that it is, but know also he’s kind of used to that sort of responsibility. He wasn’t trained for this job on a football field or in a football office, but who’s to say he wasn’t properly trained by other means for what he’s about to do?

“Law school teaches you how to take vast amounts of information and disseminate it down to what you need to know,” Hammond said. “It teaches you problem solving, brevity in thinking, brevity in writing.

“I went to Northwestern, which is a pretty intensive law program. What I was doing was looking at all this information and then very quickly synthesizing it down and creating a product, creating an answer for something. The training is right there.”