Long and expensive story short, WVU’s athletic facilities are long overdue for a fix. Oliver Luck diplomatically said as much during a press conference yesterday, praising the university for the way it’s kept things up through the years, but admitting the need for change had outpaced the ability to maintain the venues.

Of course, that press conference was at a makeshift site outside his office that’s actually a reception area that casually doubles as a quiet area outside the academic center. Just about every penny of the (at least) $106 million will be spent and you’re not going to see anything done about media facilities that are needed for the obnoxiously sized throng covering football and basketball. This is not me complaining, either. That’s a WVU complaint, something its people have to apologize for and shrug their shoulders over all the time.

Football interviews are done in the team room, the one that should rightfully be exclusive property of the team. (That might become a media room when the new team room is completed, but given the shortage of meeting space in the Puskar Center, would you be surprised if space in the football headquarters was, you know, used for the football team?)

Basketball interviews are done in an interior concourse behind the club seats. There are two more makeshift sites there where concessions are sold and where fans eat and drink before and during a game.

It’s not good. It’s not the worst, not even in the Big 12, but it can be better. And, again, WVU wants it to get better. But it’s not even in the plans for this first wave of projects because the list of needs is just so long.

How long? Consider that I made an effort to explain the necessity of change, be it to improve things that demand improvements or to make complete fixes that weren’t made before, and I covered the most pressing matters.

Doing so, I didn’t include that the football team room has 80 seats and and the football team has 105 players … plus coaches and staffers.

I didn’t include that the Coliseum concourse project could be slowed by discovering asbestos (again) in areas where it is contained in offices or classrooms that will be wiped out to create more space.

I didn’t include the vast shortage of parking at the Coliseum that might be cured by turning Hawley Field into a parking lot.

I didn’t include that the seats  in the Coliseum are original seats. They’re breaking down and WVU can no longer buy seats or parts to fix or replace them, which means WVU will have to re-seat the entire place at some point.

I didn’t mention box seats at Mountaineer Field are originals and that many need to be replaced, and that heaters need to go in those boxes.

Those are all weighty issues, right? But they’re not heavy enough to have WVU’s attention now because WVU needs so many other things.

“I think the facilities at the university for athletics were always good, no question about that, but I think that any building that gets 30, 35, 40 years old, very much like a home or a dormitory or anything else, it needs rejuvenation and it needs updates,” Luck said. “Fans expect more — and they should expect more because we charge them more money — but fans expect more when they go to a ball game than they did certainly at old Mountaineer Field.

“I think they probably expect more than they did when new Mountaineer Field opened in 1980, and that applies to the Coliseum. A good bit of this is really for fan enjoyment. I think it’ll enhance the experience.”