It’s convenient right now to watch the parade honoring Randy Mazey’s achievements during his first season. It’s timely to recall people predicted he’d be very good very soon.

“He’s been a successful head coach before and he’s had to do it at a place like Charleston Southern, where they had nothing. That was a worse situation than at West Virginia,” Schlossnagle said. “Then he did it at East Carolina when he helped build a ball park there.

“I’m telling you, West Virginia hit more than a home run. They got a walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the ninth in Omaha hiring him.”

But it’s also important to remember that Mazey had, at the minimum, a red flag in his past.

He was suspended and later resigned as the head coach at East Carolina. There was never an explanation for either action. Mazey and deputy athletic director Mike Parsons would sidestep the question when Mazey was introduced as the head coach last year.

You can look around find a a small variety of explanations with similar threads and you can  believe those, if you choose. I know I talked to a few people, basically out of curiosity, and was told it wasn’t anything related to rules and really wasn’t a poisonous offense, and I chose to believe that.

Truly, none of that matters, as curious as it may be to see a winning head coach pushed out at a school that likes winning baseball. Fact is, he’s WVU’s asset now and I highly doubt people are clamoring for clarity

There was a time when Oliver Luck was, though. It was a necessity. He wanted to hire Mazey and he needed to know why someone had wanted him gone before. Obviously, he liked what he discovered. “I did due diligence on the subjective side, and I felt a very good comfort level he was the type of person who could take the program and revitalize it,” Luck said.

Luck’s made a couple of hires already — Jill Kramer, Jason Butts, Tina Samara, Dana Holgorsen — and he’s had to dutifully do due diligence for each. He has a method for the process.

“Ultimately, there’s like two boxes you have to look into and hopefully neither is Pandora’s box,” Luck responded when asked what it is like hiring coaches in today’s environment.

“One is sort of the more objective data … where had this individual been coaching and for how long and the data that is available on his record. You have to go back, even to when he or she was a (graduate assistant). You go and get the highlights, but you want to check the lowlights, too.

“That’s one box. The second box is what kind of a person is he or she. How does he or she motivate a team? How do people who have worked for the coach or above the person view them? What does a former AD say about the person or what does a former player say?

“That’s not as objective. It’s subjective.”