Rich Rod Sends Strong NIL Message: WVU Is ‘Not Going to Let’ Its Best Players Leave

The future of West Virginia football appears to be bright. But appears is the key word — we'll have to see how good of a job they do retaining all of those talented youngsters.

We've heard over the last several months from both Rich Rodriguez and athletic director Wren Baker about the financial situation being much better. In an interview with the Big 12 Conference, Rodriguez was asked about WVU's NIL situation and whether they would be able to hang on to their best talent.

“The most important factor to me is retaining the ones who have earned it. We don’t have a lot of fluffy slogans, but one of those is earned success. And if you do well, we’ll take care of you the best we can. We’ve told them that, and we did that last year, this year, and we’ll do it going forward. We got to reward the guys that have done well and proven themselves. But you still also got to have a little bit of money for the high school guys and new guys — that number is just going crazy. High school guys getting $1.5 million based on what? They had a great high school career, and they earned something, but they haven’t earned as much as what current college players have earned. For us, we want to make sure that when guys come, we take care of them the best we can. If they do well, they’re going to get rewarded, and we’re not going to let them leave. Now, someone may give them like double the salary somewhere, and they have that $40M-$50M roster, but we’re going to try to keep all our good players.”

Addressing the false narrative

West Virginia University linebacker Josiah Trotter | Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

I can't tell you how many times I've come across comments on social media or people telling me directly about their concerns with WVU sports being able to compete in this era of NIL. I totally understand the concern, and to be frank, you should be a little skeptical until the football and basketball teams prove they can win in this era.

The thing that many of those same folks continue to throw out there is that West Virginia can't retain its players, particularly in football.

I would argue that we don't know yet whether they can or not. When NIL was first introduced, they weren't as prepared as they needed to be, which is what led to many of those key departures early in the Neal Brown tenure.

And then guys like Josiah Trotter, Trey Lathan, Tomas Rimac, etc. were mostly gone because of the coaching change after the 2024 season. Sure, some of those guys had stronger $ offers elsewhere, but I wouldn't label that as the only reason they left. WVU couldn't afford to match some of those offers because they had to fill so many spots, essentially an entire team.

West Virginia is better resourced with all of the fundraising that has been done by the administration and the all-time high the MAC reached with over 7,934 members and growing. To say WVU will have a difficult time retaining its best players is a premature assessment. Just as much as it is to say that they will be able to. We're about to find out after some of these guys put up a strong season this fall.

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