Let’s face it: ending your season with a 49–0 loss to Texas Tech isn’t ideal. A win wasn’t expected, but there was a sense this team would at least flash something – something they could build on heading into next year.
Over the last month, they upset Houston, handled Colorado, and should have beaten Arizona State. It was an up-and-down year with more downs than ups, but the future does look promising, especially when you look past the final score and focus on the pieces already in place. READ MORE: WVU Football — The rebuild before the rise
Rich Rodriguez will be back for his second season of this new era, and he’s doing it after inheriting a roster with more than 90 new players from the portal and high school recruiting. The glaring weakness was in the trenches – specifically the offensive line.
That group simply has to get better, and it should with the recruit Kevin Brown anchoring things. The issues were painfully obvious in Morgantown, where the Red Raiders lived in the backfield and pressured Scotty Fox Jr. all game long.
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Fox, though, had a solid season for a true freshman. He should be in position to win the job again next year, but with Rodriguez, you know competition is coming – and that’s a good thing for a program still defining its identity.
Culture
We saw glimpses of the patented Rich Rod offense – the tempo, the formations, the chaos. What we didn’t see was a team that fully bought into the “Hard Edge” mentality. That was on display against Texas Tech, where you literally saw players quit on plays.
Cam Vaughn, one of the few bright spots on offense, didn’t even chase a defender after an interception. I can’t imagine that happening on a Rodriguez-coached team much longer, especially as the culture begins to take root.
“Transactional nature of college sports now, it’s sometimes easier to get problems and sometimes easier to fix problems,” Rodriguez said after the loss. “I don’t think that I’ll try to just go out and get a bunch of portal guys to fix it with that. We did what we had to do last year with the timeline – we’re going and being late on the high school cycle. I’m really excited about our recruiting class. I’m not just saying that because I’m up here and we just got our butts whipped.”
Foundation
This is the new age of college football. A lot of players on this roster already know they won’t be back next season – or that they’re the ones heading for the portal. Once Rodriguez gets a few classes of high-school recruits into the program, that turnover should slow down, and the foundation should finally feel stable.
But as I said, I don’t want to dwell on the negative. We’ve moved on from “The Climb,” and for the first time in a while, there’s a real plan for the future. And if history tells us anything, year two can be where things flip – Rodriguez went 9–3 in his second season during his first stint as WVU’s head coach.
Things change quickly in college football, and I expect the same for the Mountaineers. And yes – I’ll remember that comeback win over Pitt for years. That game encapsulated everything we want this program to be. And I truly believe WVU will be pushing for a playoff spot within the next couple of years.
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