Rich Rodriguez Addresses Rushing Woes Against Tech and Evaluating for the '26 Season

West Virginia University head coach Rich Rodriguez gave his assessment of the Mountaineers' loss to the Red Raiders

Nov 29, 2025; Morgantown, West Virginia, USA; West Virginia Mountaineers head coach Rich Rodriguez walks along the sidelines during the first quarter against the Texas Tech Red Raiders at Milan Puskar Stadium. | Ben Queen-Imagn Images

The West Virginia Mountaineers (4-8, 2-7) concluded the regular season with a humbling 49-0 loss to Texas Tech (11-1, 9-1) on Saturday.

West Virginia University head coach Rich Rodriguez met with the media following the game and addressed the Mountaineers shortcomings against the Red Raiders.

On West Virginia rushing for 37 yards

I’ve done this a long time, and I know when you’re up against a challenge, but I also thought we would respond better. Obviously, we didn't play well in any phase, didn’t coach well, and they (Texas Tech) have a really good team. But it’s disappointing that we didn’t get a few more things going in the run game. They’re really good up front.

 I’ve done this long enough - I know our problems and I know how to fix our problems. It’s painful to do it, but we’ll do it. Our problems didn’t just arise this week. It’s been there all season. I'll know what we need to do and how we got to go about doing it, but that process will be tough.

 I do appreciate the seniors, I told them that. There are a lot of them that came here for six months, or some of them have been here for a long time, and I think they did give us their best effort. Unfortunately, they didn’t go out the way we wanted to go out, but I appreciate them. For the rest of the team, staff, players, and everybody included, I’ll evaluate everything as I always do, and I’ll fix our problems. Some of them can be fixed pretty quickly, some of them might take a little time, but I know what they are.

On addressing the issues facing the team this season

Well, in the transactional nature of college sports now, it’s sometimes easier to get problems, and sometimes it's easier to fix problems. I don’t think that we will try to just go get a bunch of portal guys and fix it with that. Again, we had to do what we had to do last year in the way the timeline was going and being late on the high school recruiting cycle. I’m really excited about our new recruiting class, and I’m not just saying that because I’m up here and we got our tails kicked. I think we’ll sign maybe 40 high school and junior college guys next week. We’ll get a dozen or so out of the portal, fix our problems. We’ll get some young guys here in our program to get bigger, faster, stronger in the weight room.

I’ll fix some other issues I think we may have. You know, nobody likes this, least of all me. This is not good, but it ain’t going to stay like this forever. So, like I said, some of our problems are going to be a little harder to fix, but we’ll fix them.

On how this game can be used to evaluate for next season

I have to look at every game, but also every practice. We film practice. Everything. It's not whether it is the right fit or not. Defensively, today we had some guys in position for contested balls and they (Texas Tech) won them all. Does that happen all the time? I don’t know. It happened too much today. There were times offensively where the guy is blocking the right guy, but the other guy got the best of him. We have to figure out ways to get our guys more successful as coaches. Then frankly, we have to recruit at a high level. Recruiting now is more than just selling your school, selling your town, or selling your program. Recruiting now involves the rev-share piece of it. Going forward, we are going to be in better shape than we were this time of year last year.

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