MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - One of the basic tenets of real estate is "location, location, location." Well, one of the basic tenets of football scheduling is "relationships, relationships, relationships."
 
That's how former director of athletics Ed Pastilong once managed to arrange a football series with Notre Dame that included a date with the Fighting Irish in Morgantown in 2000.
 
Ed got to know former Notre Dame director of athletics Dick Rosenthal when West Virginia and Notre Dame were involved in the reformation of the Big East Conference in the early 1990s and a friendship soon evolved. 
 
Pastilong was able to talk Rosenthal, an avid golfer, into coming to Morgantown to play a couple of rounds at Lakeview Resort and born out of that was a two-for-one series with Notre Dame, the second of the three games occurring in Morgantown on Saturday, Oct. 21, 2000.
 
"Notre Dame was the only school we would have ever considered doing a two-for-one with," Pastilong recalled recently.
 

Getting Notre Dame, Ohio State, or SEC programs Auburn and LSU to come to Morgantown were real scheduling coups for Pastilong during his 21-year tenure as director of athletics.
 
Since the early 1980s, when Don Nehlen elevated West Virginia from a regional football program to a national player, well-known football brands such as Miami, South Carolina, Missouri, Purdue, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, Mississippi State, Auburn, Colorado and LSU have played football games in Morgantown.
 
West Virginia has also had one-off matchups against Nebraska in the 1994 Kickoff Classic in East Rutherford, New Jersey, against Alabama in the 2014 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game in Atlanta and against BYU in 2016 in Landover, Maryland.
 
Next Saturday, West Virginia will play another one-off against Tennessee, a college football program with its own national pedigree.
 
Considering the relative closeness of the two schools and their long football histories, it's rather remarkable that these two traditional programs have never played before.
 
Pastilong recalled having informal conversations with former Tennessee athletic director Doug Dickey on a couple of occasions at NACDA meetings through the years, but workable dates were always elusive.
 
Relationships have certainly played a role in the non-conference football games Tennessee scheduled through the years, whether it was the Volunteers' strong ties with Hayden Fry when he coached at SMU and later at Iowa, or Notre Dame, UCLA, and Boston College, where Gene DeFilippo, who earned a master's degree at Tennessee, once worked as an administrator.
 
Boston College is one of the rare instances when Tennessee actually left the warmth and security of the Deep South to play a football game in a colder weather climate on more than once instance.
 
Otherwise, the games Tennessee has played against teams from this part of the country were almost always on their terms, which usually meant in Knoxville … and that includes Pitt and Penn State.
 
Penn State's only two regular season meetings with Tennessee took place in Knoxville in 1971 and 1972. Pitt has also played Tennessee just twice, both at Neyland Stadium in 1980 and 1983, when former Panther coach Johnny Majors was leading the Vols.
 
Tennessee had a brief series with Maryland in the 1950s when "Big" Jim Tatum had the Terps near the top of the national rankings, which included a rare Tennessee trip to College Park, Maryland, in 1957.
 
Syracuse also somehow wrestled a home game out of Tennessee in 1998 when the Vols needed to kick a late field goal to knock off the Orange, 34-33, to keep their national championship march alive.
 
Temple traveled to Tennessee twice for "buy" games in 1944 and 1990, as did Rutgers on three occasions on 1979, 1985 and 2002. Rutgers actually upset Tennessee, 13-7, in a homecoming game in Knoxville in 1979 after a local Tennessee sportswriter had infuriated the Scarlet Knights when he a wrote a column wanting to know what a 'Rutgers' was, according to retired UT sports information director Bud Ford.
 
The curiosity in Knoxville is understandable considering West Virginia played Rutgers 39 times from 1916 until 2011 and nobody here knows what a Rutgers is either.
 
Nevertheless, West Virginia and Tennessee are finally meeting this Saturday at a neutral site venue at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina.
 
Before this year, Tennessee's only gridiron flings with West Virginia occurred on the recruiting trails when the Volunteers used to come up to the West Virginia to raid some of the state's best football players. The name George Cafegfo remains well-known in Tennessee and is still somewhat recognizable in southern coalfields of West Virginia where he grew up in the 1920s.
 
Nearly half of Tennessee's starting lineup that played USC in the 1940 Rose Bowl team was made up of West Virginians, as were the Volunteers' 1940 and 1943 Sugar Bowl teams.
 
Bluefield's Bob Davis was a starter on Tennessee's national championship team in 1951, as was Alderson's Pat Shires, the younger brother of UT All-American Abe Shires.
 
Even into the 1960s and 1970s, when top football prospects were becoming more of a rarity in West Virginia, Tennessee was still getting some of the state's top players such Welch's Tom Callaway, Charleston's Ronnie McCartney, Oak Glen's Jim Woofter, Charleston's Mark Moore, Weirton's Keith Jeter and even Morgantown High's Carey Bailey, the son of former WVU basketball standout Carey Bailey Sr.
 
So going to Knoxville for a "buy" game or arranging a 2-for-1 series with Tennessee was out of the question for West Virginia, which is why these two programs never considered playing before Nehlen's tenure.
 
And then when West Virginia improved its national brand under Nehlen, there were no firm relationships to arrange anything workable for both schools - that is until Will Webb of the Charlotte Sports Foundation got involved.
 
Former WVU director of athletics Oliver Luck, now CEO and commissioner of the XFL, said the seeds for Saturday's West Virginia-Tennessee game were actually sown at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee.
 
He explains.
 
"I remember talking to the Bristol Motor Speedway about doing a double-header in Bristol and the goal was to set the college football attendance record," Luck said. "We went down to see the Speedway folks, and the teams that were talked about, as I recall, were West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Tennessee and maybe Alabama, given their track record of success and their fans traveling well.
 
"So, we were kicking around the idea of setting the attendance record, and they ended up doing a game at the Speedway with Virginia Tech and Tennessee playing."
 
Virginia Tech-Tennessee turned out to be a very wise choice as the two were able to get nearly 157,000 spectators to the race track to set the single-game NCAA attendance record.
 
Although Luck wasn't successful getting a game for West Virginia in Bristol, he did begin to develop a dialogue with former Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton and one of his senior staffers, Chris Fuller, who earned a sports management master's degree from WVU. Fuller, by the way, is now deputy director of athletics at UNC Charlotte.
 
"As we were talking about the Bristol game and then Tennessee became involved, it came to our understanding that West Virginia and Tennessee had never played before," Luck said. "When it didn't work out, we indicated our interest in staying involved with Tennessee to try and play somewhere else."
 
Luck actually drove to Knoxville on one occasion to visit with Hamilton and Fuller, which is how the relationship strengthened.
 
But it became clear to Luck that Tennessee wasn't interested in playing a home and home series similar to what Pastilong had once arranged with SEC programs LSU, Auburn and Mississippi State, which is understandable considering Tennessee's football scheduling history, and that's when Will Webb brought up the possibility of the two schools meeting in Charlotte.
 
"With us being down there several times to play football games, and drawing well, he kind of put the deal together and we went from there," Luck recalled.
 
So that's how these two longtime grid programs, whose histories date back to the late 1800s and encompass more than 2,500 college football games between them, are finally meeting.
 
A convenient location and a workable date in Charlotte helped, for sure, but "relationships, relationships, relationships" is how the game finally got done.
 
And you can expect more appealing games like this in the future, based on some of the relationships current director of athletics Shane Lyons has developed working in the SEC, the Atlantic Coast Conference and at the NCAA through the years.