WVU's Rich Rodriguez still learning new transfers, trying to use culture to unify roster

Dominion Post

6 days ago

FRISCO, Texas — Preseason camp is just a couple of weeks away for West Virginia football, and the roster is shaping up. The roster from 2024 will look completely different than 2025, which is expected since Rich Rodriguez wasn't the head coach in 2024. In the era of the transfer portal, new coaches can completely flip rosters, and Rodriguez did exactly that.
Out of the winter and spring portal, Rodriguez brought in close to 70 new players, up there for the top number of additions. There were departures in the winter and spring, but knowing there are only 105 roster spots, that's nearly the entire roster. A complete roster flip happens more in basketball, but those rosters only consist of 15 players.
'There really wasn't a master plan; your first year usually brings a lot of roster turnover, especially with a new staff,' Rodriguez said at Big 12 Media Day on Wednesday. 'It ended up being more than we expected, but we didn't panic.'
During an interview on the ESPN stage, Rodriguez joked a little about how he's still adjusting his roster size.
'I'm still trying to figure all their names out,' Rodriguez said. 'Half of those players weren't there in the spring. You get a little bit of knowledge in summer workouts. Not a whole lot. The August camp is so important.'
August camp starts in less than 25 days, and the season's first game is only 50. Rodriguez has a tough task of getting his new players acclimated. Rodriguez said establishing culture is the most important part of creating some unity in a team made up mostly of transfers.
'You have to make sure the culture is right first and foremost,' Rodriguez said. 'Did we evaluate right? All these new guys we brought in, you've got to make sure you evaluated right and that they are guys that can play. I think we did.'
The culture will be what most spectators of a Rodriguez squad would expect: the hard-nose, moving bodies and physical team, or the Rodriguez trademark 'hard edge.'
It's harder nowadays to develop a culture in college football, though. There are two transfer portals, with the one in the spring sometimes making the culture building in the winter and early spring pointless. One of Rodriguez's biggest issues with college football now is that a coach can coach a player all spring, and at the end, he can jump ship and play against the coach a couple of months later.
Now, not playing isn't the only reason a player could leave. There's money involved, and players could jump for more money.
Rodriguez said, 'it's not easy' to develop culture.
'It's not just because kids are different today,' Rodriguez said. 'As much as an old-school traditional coach I am. I'm also like, what does today's world look like to these guys? What can we do now with these guys to motivate them to play at their very highest? I still think that's our greatest responsibility as a coach. We can take them somewhere where they can't take themselves. That's what coaching is all about.'
Culture has become a buzzword for college football. A lot of coaches try to create a culture within their football program and come up short. Rodriguez couldn't implement culture at Arizona or Michigan, but maybe at his alma mater, he can integrate it again like he did before he left.
'The one thing we wanted to make sure we have in the first year is that we establish the environment and the culture,' Rodriguez said. 'Coaches use that word all the time, but do they really adhere to it on a daily basis on everything you do? We are. We are doing that. The players have done a great job of buying into it. We'll see what happens.'