West Virginia wants you to remember some guys
The Mountaineers have brought back Rich Rodriguez and some of his biggest former stars as part of an unlikely reunion. There's reason to believe the experiment can work
On a frigid early December night in northern West Virginia, what was supposed to be a coronation turned into a catastrophe.
It was the end of the 2007 season, with a high-powered West Virginia football team needing only a win against lowly rival Pitt, which limped into the game with a 4-7 record, to earn a spot in the national championship game. Instead, the Backyard Brawl lived up to its name, with the Mountaineers’ offense languishing against a Panthers’ defense that loaded the box and utilized a Cover 0 scheme to pick up a stunning victory in a game that’s known nearly two decades later only by its final score – 13-9.
By the time the final horn blared, Mountaineers coach Rich Rodriguez walked off the field defeated in more ways than one.
The West Virginia native had nearly led his alma mater to the sport’s promised land, but had fallen painfully short against the team he could least afford to do so. Within a few weeks, he was off to Michigan, leaving behind a hurt and betrayed state that was in no mood to forgive its native son.
Eighteen years after that tortuous walk off Mountaineer Field, Rodriguez will return as a conquering hero.
Last December, West Virginia brought Rodriguez back to lead its football program, surprising much of the college football world with a move that had once seemed like fanciful message-board fodder. On Aug. 30, he’ll lead the Mountaineers out on the field against Robert Morris, marking the start of a second stint at the school in which he’ll try to lead the program to something close to the heights he reached in his first tenure.
It’s college football’s most improbable reunion, generating the kind of warm feelings that would have seemed impossible to rekindle given Rodriguez’s once-fraught relationship with the university, state and its residents.
If it’s starting to feel like 2007 again in Morgantown, there’s a pretty good reason for it.
Rich Rodriguez’s improbable West Virginia reconciliation
A program bringing back a successful former coach to try to recreate the magic they once had isn’t unusual in college football.
It’s happened several times this century, with Mack Brown and North Carolina, Bill Snyder and Kansas State, Bobby Petrino and Louisville, and Greg Schiano and Rutgers, just to name a few. West Virginia wasn’t even the only school in its own conference to welcome in a coach for a second stint, with UCF rehiring Scott Frost four days before the Mountaineers did the same with Rodriguez.
In what’s become a familiar genre, Rodriguez’s journey back was likely the most turbulent.
In his final years with the program, Rodriguez built West Virginia into a national powerhouse, with the Mountaineers going 33-5 in his final three seasons and winning two BCS bowl games (though RichRod had left for Michigan before the second of those victories). His teams not only won, but did so with an unmistakable flair. Using a zone-read offense Rodriguez had inadvertently invented while at Division II Glenville State in the early 1990s, West Virginia racked up points in a way few in modern college football history have, with the quarterback-running back tandem of Pat White and Steve Slaton forming a bond that was as magical as it was unstoppable.
Naturally, that success attracted suitors. In 2006, Rodriguez was offered the job at Alabama before declining it, forcing the Crimson Tide to settle for another West Virginia native, some guy named Nick Saban. One year later, Michigan, the winningest program in the sport’s history, was too much to turn down.
The split between Rodriguez and West Virginia, both the university and the state, was anything but amicable.
The coach left the school only four months after signing a one-year contract extension through 2013, signaling an increased level of commitment to the Mountaineers only to bolt shortly thereafter. By leaving when he did, he owed West Virginia a $4 million buyout. His attorneys offered just $1.5 million, leading to a lawsuit in which the Mountaineers were able to recoup the full buyout.
Even before he said yes to Michigan, tensions had been escalating between Rodriguez and his alma mater. According to emails obtained at the time by the Associated Press, Rodriguez and his agent, Mike Brown, were pursuing a promised "culture change" at West Virginia and a shake-up at the highest levels of the athletic department. By that November, Brown was threatening West Virginia, warning that Rodriguez could leave for potential openings at Florida State or Texas A&M. West Virginia leadership had grown disenchanted with Rodriguez, who kept asking for more control and money. By the final days of his tenure, he reportedly wasn’t speaking with athletic director Ed Pastilong.
His decision to leave turned a state that once embraced him against him.
Rodriguez's parents, who lived near the West Virginia campus, claimed they were harassed by Mountaineers fans after their son’s abrupt exit. A highway sign declaring Grant Town, W.Va., as Rodriguez's hometown was removed.
A Public Policy Polling study in the state in 2013 found that only 11% of West Virginia residents had a favorable view of Rodriguez while 47% viewed him unfavorably. The poll was conducted nearly six years after Rodriguez had left West Virginia and three years after he was unceremoniously fired at Michigan.
"Everybody has taken sides and many believe Rich is a traitor," a prominent West Virginia booster said to ESPN in 2008. "The endgame is the university is a big loser because the image of the university is tarnished, and that's sad."
Time, as it often does, eventually healed many of those gaping wounds.
None of Rodriguez’s three immediate successors came close to matching his accomplishments, at least over a sustained period. The late Bill Stewart is still a beloved figure in the state – he even has a highway exit near West Virginia’s campus named after him – but the Mountaineers never lost fewer than four games in a season in his three years at the helm. Dana Holgorsen had two 10-win campaigns in eight seasons, but the program’s inconsistency and his standoffish personality never truly endeared him to West Virginians. Neal Brown, who finished with a winning record twice in six seasons, simply didn’t win enough. Since Rodriguez left, the program has failed to finish inside the top 15 of the final Associated Press poll.
By the time Brown was fired, the calls to bring Rodriguez back were loud – and not just because subtlety-challenged former Mountaineers kicker Pat McAfee was saying it. After going 27-10 in three seasons at Jacksonville State, including 18-8 in its first two FBS seasons, West Virginia fans were very clear which way they wanted the school’s coaching search to go.
Ultimately, they were rewarded, with an apologetic-but-confident Rodriguez returning to a home he wished he never left.
“I understand that there’s fans that are upset,” he said at his introductory press conference. “At least they care, right? Sometimes, not everything is as you think it is. But I made a mistake. My promise to not just the folks that are upset, but to everybody here and everybody that’s been very, very supportive…I will earn your support. We will earn your support and your trust back. I’m committed to that, and I’ve thought about that even before this opportunity. This is my home. This is such a great state. I’ll prove to them that the man to my right made the right decision.”
He’s bringing some guys with him
Rodriguez isn’t coming back to Morgantown alone, either.
Some of the most recognizable and celebrated figures from the coach’s first tenure at West Virginia have joined him for the second go-around, this time in coaching roles.
White, the star quarterback who made the zone-read hum, is on staff as an assistant quarterbacks coach and assistant to the head coach, looking barely a day older than he did when he left campus about 15 years ago. Noel Devine’s back, as well, with the former standout running back and prized recruit serving as an offensive analyst and assistant running backs coach. For good measure, former Mountaineers star quarterback Rasheed Marshall is there, too, though he was already in place as the football program’s director of player relations before Rodriguez came back.
It’s hardly uncommon for a program under a new coach to bring prominent former players on staff. If nothing else, it’s a way to generate some positive headlines and engender some goodwill with a fan base that’s probably still skeptical of what this new guy might be able to do leading their beloved school.
The thing with White and Devine, though, is they transcend that trope. These are more than just ex-jocks looking to stay close to the game they love and parlaying their fame into a steady paycheck.
Much like the offense he ran to perfection, White’s ascent to national stardom happened almost by accident. As a little-used freshman in 2005, he entered a game against a top-20 Louisville team after starter Adam Bednarik was injured early in the fourth quarter. With his team trailing 24-7, White led the Mountaineers on a spirited comeback that ended with a thrilling 46-44 overtime victory that jumpstarted a new era of West Virginia football and, by extension, Rodriguez’s career.
Starting with that game and going all the way through the end of the 2007 season, the Mountaineers went 28-4. White and Slaton became one of the defining duos of that era in the sport, with fans playing EA’s college football video game often agreeing to not allow anyone to play with West Virginia because it was so effortless that it felt like cheating.
Devine was only around for the final stretch of Rodriguez’s stay, but he was a legend in his own right, a short-but-lightning-fast five-star recruit out of south Florida who everybody in the country wanted, but West Virginia was able to land. Devine had a productive college career, rushing for more than 4,000 yards and nearly 30 touchdowns, but he’s still perhaps best remembered for having one of the first YouTube highlight reels that seemingly every college football fan across the country had watched, a video that went viral before it was really a thing.
White and Devine weren’t just star players who were revered inside the borders of the Mountain State, but cultural touchstones for young fans nationally who followed the sport or were in the process of falling in love with it.
The two have coaching bona fides and Rodriguez has made it clear he didn’t hire them merely to relive the glory days. White has been coaching in some capacity since 2018, with stops at Alcorn State, Alabama State, South Florida and the Los Angeles Chargers. Devine had worked as a trainer and coached at North Fort Myers High School in Florida.
"We can't relive the past, even though we have people from the past right back here in the building,” Devine said to ESPN in the spring. The only thing we can do is lay down the blueprint, the gold standard, blue collar work ethic, and try to instill the same thing that was instilled in us. ... We can't relive the past, but we can rebuild."
Can this work?
The Rodriguez that has returned to West Virginia in 2025 isn’t the same one that left in 2007.
His hair is gray. There are wrinkles where there once used to be smooth skin. He’s no longer the coaching wunderkind, either. Over the past two decades, he has taken his share of lumps, some of which were harder to forgive than others. His three years at Michigan were an undeniable failure, with a 15-22 record that gives him the worst losing percentage in the program’s storied history (though I’m in the minority that believes the Wolverines were too quick to pull the plug on what they knew would be a long-term rebuild). He was fired at Arizona in Jan. 2018 after an investigation into claims from a former administrative assistant who accused him in a lawsuit of sexually harassing her and creating a hostile work environment.
There’s reason to doubt this experiment can work, beyond the fact that these arrangements seldom go as well the second time around as they did the first (as I detailed back in a February newsletter).
College football has changed dramatically in the 18 years since Rodriguez first left West Virginia, with NIL and the transfer portal shaping the sport in profound and unavoidable ways. Rodriguez has coached under those parameters down at Jacksonville State, but he hasn’t yet shown he can thrive in that environment at a major-conference program. He’s already displayed some signs he’s a bit of a hard-ass in ways that could be counterproductive with modern players and recruits, like his decision to ban players from posting TikToks of themselves dancing.
"They're going to be on it, so I'm not banning them from it," he said back in March. "I'm just banning them from dancing on it. It's like, look, we try to have a hard edge or whatever, and you're in there in your tights dancing on TikTok, ain't quite the image of our program that I want."
West Virginia turning to Rodriguez to rescue its football program isn’t misguided nostalgia, though. It’s quite plausible, and perhaps even likely, he succeeds.
While the Mountaineers have changed conferences, it’s not the kind of dramatic step up in competition that dooms other repeat hires. The current Big 12 is undoubtedly deeper than the Big East Rodriguez coached in during the mid-2000s, but is it really any better at the top? For as much as Big East football became a punchline, West Virginia, Louisville, Cincinnati and Rutgers were regularly ranked during the conference’s final years, with the Mountaineers and Cardinals helping the league go 5-3 in BCS bowl games in its last eight years of existence.
Having so many former players on staff could help Rodriguez’s message get through to his current players in his more hard-headed moments. White, for example, had told me in 2015 that he was on the verge of transferring and pursuing a professional baseball career before his star turn in that Louisville game.
McAfee’s megaphone will undeniably help, too, as the ESPN personality was more than happy to use his outsized influence at the country’s top sports network to help West Virginia bring back Rodrigue. He has made sizable donations to the program and will ostensibly do what he can to help his former coach from afar. And while there are plenty of jokes to be made about the demographics of McAfee’s audience, his show has become a popular place for top recruits to make their college commitment announcements.
Most importantly, though, Rodriguez not only wins, but he does so with a playing style and philosophy that’s basically timeless. Running the absolute hell out of the ball has been and will always be an effective way to win ballgames.
In Rodriguez’s past 15 years as an FBS head coach, his teams have finished a season with a top-50 scoring offense 13 times, including seven times in the top 25. During that same stretch, he’s led a top-50 total offense 12 times. Most impressively, Rodriguez teams over those 15 years have finished in the top 15 in the FBS in yards per carry 11 times, including seven times in the top 10 and three times as the No. 1 team in the country.
If the system Rodriguez pioneered has worked everywhere he’s been before, why would it suddenly stop working now, especially at a place that’s almost-literally-but-not-quite in his blood?
That fateful 2007 season represented West Virginia’s last true chance at a national championship, a high it has chased ever since but never come particularly close to replicating. The 12-team College Football Playoff offers avenues that weren’t previously available to programs pursuing a title – merely making it there is an accomplishment enough – and in a wide-open league with a guaranteed berth in the field, West Virginia seems about as well-equipped as anyone in the Big 12 to compete for a spot in there.
Even if the Mountaineers are never able to totally reclaim what Rodriguez, White and so many others created almost 20 years ago, his return has given West Virginia fans reason to care and believe again. And that, at least for now, means something.
My favorite things I read this week
- ’s write-up on the nine strangest non-conference matchups in college football this season had me cracking up
This analysis from
on what appears to be MLS’ struggles to break through on Apple TV was fascinatingNathan Fenno is one of the best investigative journalists in the country and his latest story in The Athletic on a stalker who went after Aaron Donald was jarring
I got a lot of perverse joy out of this Defector story on the worst songs we love so much, if only because it includes “Re-Arranged” by Limp Bizkit, an excellent song by an otherwise shitty band
A haunting-but-necessary read from Esther Sun of the Columbia Daily Spectator on how staff at Columbia stifled student dissent over the ongoing horrors in Gaza. It’s another reminder of how invaluable student journalism is
(Photos: Jim Crawford/Paradise Jam, Associated Press, West Virginia Athletics)