MORGANTOWN — If Rich Rodriguez’s introductory press conference Friday came his first time around at West Virginia University back in 2001, he would have a little more time to bask in the glow of returning to Morgantown. As it stands in the current state of college football, what used to be a quiet time in December is anything but.
“We’re recruiting right now because we’re in the transfer portal,” he said during Friday’s press conference.
The landscape of the sport now is much different than it was in Rodriguez’s first go-around as WVU’s football coach. It’s a landscape he’ll have to navigate as he hits the ground running trying to build and develop his first roster.
It’s not that Rodriguez is a stranger to the new frontiers of college football – transfer portals, name, image and likeness deals and revenue sharing. It’s just that he’ll view all those things from a much different perspective in Morgantown than he did the last three seasons as head coach at Jacksonville State.
WIth the Gamecocks, he often was the fish that was eaten, with his top players wooed by larger programs with the carrot of NIL money. Now he’s at WVU, which is a fish in the college football pond that has some more choices off the menu.
WVU athletic director Wren Baker sees that difference and believes Rodriguez will be able to handle it. Actually, Baker thinks Rodriguez’s JSU experience would make him even more prepared.
“Coaches like Coach Rodriguez, I would argue, are better equipped in some ways to navigate the portal because they’re having to deal with all this without the financial resources just to retain people,” he said. “If you’re a Group of Five school, your roster is really getting picked over. So in terms of trying to replenish talents and in terms of trying to keep talent without being able to afford spending money, I would argue they’re better prepared, in some ways, for navigating the portal.”
Rodriguez said his top priority was to retain the necessary players on the current roster so they don’t enter the transfer portal. One significant defender, starting linebacker Josiah Trotter, already has entered. Rodriguez can see just a few hours south in Huntington how damaging a portal exodus can be. After Charles Huff left Marshall for Southern Mississippi, so many players on the Thundering Herd’s two-deep entered the portal that the team had to pull out of the Independence Bowl.
The second priority, he said, was to scour the portal to see what players are out there that may make an impact at WVU. After that, the process goes a little old school – it becomes about talent evaluation and being honest with the players on the roster.
“We’ve got to evaluate our current players and how good they are, and then we’ve got to be completely honest with our guys,” he said, “not just now, but certainly in the spring. I don’t want to have a guy and tell him, ‘Oh, you’re going to be a starter,’ but he’s going to be a third-string guy. He probably needs to go somewhere else.
“From the transfer portal situation, I’d like to see it slow down a little bit,” he said. “But unfortunately, that’s the landscape we’re in. So you have to constantly evaluate every day about building, not just your program, but your team.”
The portal is only one of the new wrinkles to college athletics. Now players can be paid directly through revenue sharing and NIL dollars. It’s a lot to handle for one person, which is why college football programs are starting to mirror professional football programs even more.
Rodriguez understands that the responsibilities of a college head coach now reach further than simply game preparation and designing a playbook. He also isn’t averse to bringing in help to make it work.
“There’s a lot more that a head coach has to do outside the Xs and Os and developing players,” he said. “So you better have a great staff. I’m still involved in the football part because I love that stuff, but I have to put together a great staff.
“Fortunately, we have the means to put together a great staff that can take some of the budren off of me in all these aspects.
— Story by Derek Redd
