West Virginia’s Fight Proves Rich Rodriguez is Building Something Real

Building a culture is not an easy thing to do in college sports anymore. The transfer portal makes it so hard for a variety of reasons. For one, you have a number of players transferring out every year, which means you'll have new guys coming in, and you have to reteach your vision for the program to a segment of the roster. Before, you only did it with the freshman class.

When you're in year one, it's normal to experience a bunch of bumps in the road when it comes to building the culture you want. What makes it even more challenging is when things aren't going as you expected in the win-loss column. Players have a tendency to check out and think about the future; some even end up self-redshirting and ultimately transfer out.

“It’s harder now," Rodriguez said. "I think most coaches would tell you every week it’s a battle. When you set the culture and it’s really set in, you don’t have to worry about that; it’s going to take care of itself. It’s taking us a lot longer than what we wanted to get it there, but there wasn’t really a total in the bad area. A couple weeks ago, the Central Florida game, I was upset because we didn’t not just play well, but I didn’t think our effort was to the standard which we expect. The last couple weeks it has been.”

Checking out is not a part of this West Virginia team's DNA, which was evident last week when they took down No. 22 Houston on the road. Entering last week's game at 2-6, the easy thing to do would be to go through the motions. Instead, they played their tails off and had the look of a team that is going to go down swinging in these final few games, building toward 2026.

As rough as the product has been to watch this season, the last two weeks show why Rich Rodriguez is the right guy for this job and will get this thing turned around sooner rather than later. The buy-in is there, and the culture is starting to align with his vision.

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