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Hua Hsu of Grantland has a nice piece on Oliver Luck, who has had an interesting life in his own right. Yet the West Virginia athletic director is known for only one thing these days.

Hsu writes:

A member of the football staff shepherds four potential transfers into Luck’s office and he invites them to sit around a conference table, cheerfully reciting some tidbit about where they grew up or what position they play as they settle into their seats. One of them has brought an entourage of his mom and little brother. Without their helmets and pads to protect them, you remember that they’re just kids: fidgety, restless, vulnerable, averting eye contact, almost shy. “I’m the athletic director around here. The AD,” Luck says. He smiles, and, if you’ve watched football over the past couple of years, you see the family resemblance. “That really stands for ‘Andrew’s Dad.’ That’s how everybody knows me nowadays.” The players laugh. They look up from their hands.

Later Hsu writes on the elder Luck:

“We always tell our student-athletes: Don’t let sports use you — you use it. You be selfish. You use it to get a free education, you use it to meet people. Don’t let it chew you up.”

It might all sound a little jaded, but Luck is here precisely because he understood all this from the beginning. College sports were always a means to an end, one that didn’t necessarily have to involve football. He was a curious and committed student who chose West Virginia over Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. He took his studies seriously and was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1981. Though he was the Houston Oilers’ second-round draft pick in 1982 and the team’s starter for the 1983 season, he describes his time in the NFL with a sense of detachment. Luck didn’t aspire for a long career and instead set the more modest goal of playing long enough to qualify for an NFL pension. The 1982 players’ strike had pressed him to think about life after football, so in his free time and during the offseason he took night-school classes toward a law degree. In 1987 he retired from the Oilers — with a pension — and received a law degree from the University of Texas. “I was healthy,” he says. “I saw a lot of guys that played 10 or 12 years who were all beat up.”

Luck is quick to point out that there was nothing unique about his extracurricular pursuits — the NFL wasn’t the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today, and a lot of guys in his day didn’t expect to get rich playing football. Still, Luck was obviously a little different: “When I knew I was going to retire, as I was getting ready for the bar exam, I thought, You know, I want to do something fun.” And so he walked away from professional football and became a lawyer.