Rich Rodriguez Breaks Down WVU Roster Overhaul and Recruiting Philosophy

Fifty-six transfers and 14 freshmen. That's what West Virginia will have entering the football program in year one of Rich Rodriguez's second stint as the Mountaineer header. Flipping a roster is not all that uncommon in today's era of the transfer portal. It's not ideal, but it helps coaches get the type of bodies and skill sets they want to fit their offensive and defensive schemes much faster.

The heavy portal numbers won't last forever, though. The plan is to still recruit and develop talent through the high school ranks and depend on the portal less and less over the years. Next offseason, WVU will have a bunch of spots to fill, with many of the transfers entering the program this season having just one year of eligibility remaining.

Rodriguez discussed how roster construction will look moving forward during our most recent episode of In the Gun.

“I tell the staff I’m not worried too much about if he’s got one year left or he got four years left or whatever. I say just get guys that are good enough to win with. I hope the majority of them have multiple years left. It’d be great to have all high school guys that are the best ones, but I just say sign the best players you can. This year, because of our late start, we had to get more portal guys because that’s what the best guys we thought that were out there. Next year, we’ll have more high school guys than portal guys. Probably a lot more. The recruiting is going really well, and we’re getting a lot of talented guys. Like I tell recruits, I’m not guaranteeing they’ll start the day they get on campus, but I don’t recruit anybody to be backups. So, if we’re recruiting a guy, it’s because we think he has an opportunity to contribute right away. So, going forward, I think we’ll be younger in our roster and hopefully build it up from there. This year, we had to be older because of the transition time.”

The one thing that I tell folks all the time is not to get too caught up in a player's ranking or list of offers. Some of the program's best all-time players had very few offers and little to no notoriety coming out of high school, at least in terms of the star system. Rodriguez couldn't care less about who a player has been offered by or how many stars he has. He's going to pursue the players he feels will fit best and develop them.

“People say, ‘Oh, this guy is a five-star or four-star. To me, they were all five stars,” he said when speaking on some of the best teams he’s had. “Just because somebody else gave them a different ranking…maybe… we saw something that somebody else didn’t see, and he was really a five-star. Maybe that star was that ability for him to play really hard, or to learn, or to get better, or to grow. We had better players when we beat people. Maybe they weren’t ranked by ‘some service’ as being a better player, but they were better players.”

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