Recently, the West Virginia Mountaineers fired Head Coach Neal Brown after six seasons at the helm. After a short search for his replacement, Athletic Director Wren Baker looks set to hire former head coach Rich Rodriguez to replace Brown. We take a look at the details with Rodriguez set to return to Morgantown.
Rodriguez Set to Return to Morgantown
Moments ago, we heard the first sources confirm that West Virginia would revisit history and bring Rodriguez back to the Mountaineers. The school has not yet announced the hire, but sources confirm that a deal is being finalized. While the decision does not come without the risk to split the fan base, the program decided to lean into the familiar with hopes that lightning can strike twice for the Mountaineers.
We discussed Rodriguez’s tenure in Morgantown in our series reviewing the Modern Era of West Virginia football several years ago. Mountaineer fans know that Rodriguez brought one of the best periods of sustained success in WVU history. The Mountaineers finished in the Top 10 of the AP rankings in three straight seasons at the end of his tenure (though Bill Stewart replaced Rodriguez for the Fiesta Bowl that last season). For a program that has only finished in the top 10 three other times in its history, that sustained success is truly unrivaled.
Peaks and Valleys Elsewhere
Rodriguez’s recent success at Jacksonville State no doubt swings the needle, too. The Gamecocks hired Rodriguez prior to the 2022 season, and he led them to a 9-2 record in their final year at the FCS level. Since then, he led the team to a 17-4 record in their first two seasons in FBS Conference USA. While Conference USA may be one of the worst (if not the worst) FBS conferences, making that jump in competition still provides challenges.
Indeed, 247Sports provides a Team Talent Composite scoring system. Its goal is to take all talent on a team at the beginning of a season and create a composite score based on the players’ recruiting rankings. As we have noted here before, using the composite scores to predict the outcome of games yields unsurprising results. Using teams’ relative scores accurately predicts over 70% of the results. Jacksonville State should have won 3 games the last two seasons by that measure. Instead, they won 17 (not including their recent conference championship game).
Rodriguez’s tenure at Arizona looks unimpressive by comparison, as he amassed a 43-35 record in his six seasons at the helm in Tucson. That said, he has the highest winning percentage of anybody who has coached there this decade. Indeed, in the last 25 seasons, Arizona has finished with a winning record just nine times. Rodriguez’s teams own five of those winning seasons.
His Michigan tenure, on the other hand, offers the biggest valley in his career. After burning bridges on the way out of Morgantown, Rodriguez took the helm in Ann Arbor and could not turn things around in the three years he spent there.
What Rodriguez Brings Back Home
Undoubtedly, the Mountaineer fan base remains split in their feelings over Rodriguez. He left suddenly after one of the most disappointing losses in West Virginia history: to a rival in the midst of a bad season in a game that would have clinched a spot in the national championship game. He burned some bridges on his way out and left behind a mess that resulted in sanctions by the NCAA for violations of practice time limitations.
Since his departure, however, the Mountaineers have finished in the Top 25 just five times, and they have not appeared in those rankings at all for the last six seasons. They had some promising options drawing from Group of Five head coaches, but they tried that with Brown recently without success. If Rodriguez returns the Mountaineers to the winning program it was during his first stay in Morgantown, we suspect the holdouts will finally forgive past transgressions. If he does not, then West Virginia can move on.
Rodriguez has the support of some of West Virginia’s biggest donors, including its most visible one: Pat McAfee. Baker recently said on a podcast that he had to set up any new coach coming into a school with the best possible circumstances to help that coach succeed. Against the backdrop of the House v. NCAA settlement and the revenue sharing that will result, donor support and excitement matter. The Mountaineers, in order to compete with other schools in the new revenue-sharing world, need to be as close to the cap of $20.5 million as they can. With Rodriguez set to return to Morgantown, he helps unlock that support.
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