Take Rich Rodriguez’s resume. Now take his name off the top. Just look at the list of accomplishments – 190 wins, 14 bowl appearances for his teams, including a trio of New Year’s Six bowls, three power-conference stints, an offense consistently sitting at or near the top of the national rankings. Don’t lie. Looking at […]
Take Rich Rodriguez’s resume. Now take his name off the top.
Just look at the list of accomplishments – 190 wins, 14 bowl appearances for his teams, including a trio of New Year’s Six bowls, three power-conference stints, an offense consistently sitting at or near the top of the national rankings.
Don’t lie. Looking at it just as a blind resume, you’re at least intrigued. You’re likely interested. Some of you may be begging West Virginia University brass to hire this guy.
But for some of you, that name makes you stop dead.
Suffice it to say that reaction to Rodriguez’s return to WVU has been … mixed … among the fanbase. Some folks are over the moon that the guy who engineered some of the Mountaineers’ greatest seasons is back for an encore. Others want nothing to do with him, saying they don’t want a retread or they’re still angry about the way he left for Michigan in 2007.
But here’s the truth: WVU was not going to find another coach with that type of background for this job. At three of his four Football Bowl Subdivision stops, he won far more than he lost. That Michigan stint was just an ill fit. A West Virginia guy walking into the blueblood surroundings of Ann Arbor went together as well as sardines and strawberry jam. Otherwise, in many seasons Rodriguez coached, his teams were playing for conference titles, if not winning them.
As for that breakup in 2007? The people on the WVU side of that feud are long gone. Three people have been WVU’s president since then. Three people have been WVU’s athletic director since then. The folks who are there now – President Gordon Gee and AD Wren Baker – are good with Rodriguez and, obviously, he’s good with them.
There’s another big reason why Rodriguez is back in old gold and blue, one that Baker mentioned when he talked to the media about the coaching search last week.
“There are great coaches who aren’t capable of this, who aren’t comfortable living in a fishbowl,” he said. “If you’re the football coach at West Virginia University, you are the most recognizable person in this state. You’re never going to stop and get gas, you’re never going to walk into a convenience store, you’re never going to go into the grocery store and buy anything where people don’t know who you are. You can feel the eyes following you.
“For some people, they can handle the pressure on game days; they can’t handle that,” Baker continued. “You can’t ever get away from it. And so I’ve spent a lot of time talking about that and trying to make sure that whoever we bring in understands that. Until you experience it, you don’t fully comprehend what it is.”
There may be no person on this planet that understands both the good and the bad that comes with being WVU’s football coach better than Rich Rodriguez. He has been called both hero and villain, champion and traitor.
Pat McAfee, Rodriguez’s former punter turned sports media sensation, has mentioned over the last couple of days that he and Rodriguez both still think about that 13-9 loss to Pitt in 2007, the one that knocked WVU out of the national championship game. McAfee said Rodriguez looks at his return to Morgantown as a road to redemption, an opportunity to right a wrong.
Are there some concerns with a Rich Rod redux? Sure. He hasn’t experienced the new frontiers of college football like name, image and likeness, revenue sharing and the transfer portal at Jacksonville State like he will at WVU. There might be a learning curve.
And his departures from WVU, Michigan and Arizona have been, to put it mildly, messy. Does WVU want to invite the possibility of another tumultuous tenure, or have the pitfalls of Rodriguez’s career humbled him in the sense that he knows he can’t falter like that again?
Here’s what we do know. His team will score plenty of points. It’ll gain a lot of yards. It’ll play hard to the echo of the whistle. It’ll be tough.
All those things should help WVU’s fanbase emerge from the funk it has sat in for the last few years of ho-hum, average performances. Fans need a jolt. WVU needed someone to give it to them. They made a pretty long list, and Rodriguez rose to the top.
WVU also needed someone who could win at West Virginia, who understood West Virginia, who embraced West Virginia. It needed someone who didn’t have to learn all those things on the job.
That was a list of one, and he’ll stand before the crowd on the floor of the Coliseum today.
-Story by Derek Redd
