Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com WVU coach Rich Rodriguez looks on during a recent spring practice.

MORGANTOWN — If you’re looking to learn anything about West Virginia’s football team Saturday when the Mountaineers hold what they are dubbing as their Football Spring Showcase, forget it.

But if you’re looking for what they hope to be a little football and a lot of fun, then it might just be the place to be on Saturday afternoon.

At least that’s the hope of Rich Rodriguez, who prefers to offer such fun to the Mountaineer fans over information about his personnel to opponents or potential player poachers in what has become a truly paranoid world of college football.

Once they worried about stealing your signs.

Today they worry about you stealing their players through the transfer portal and would prefer you not finding out about their abilities almost as soon as the coaching staff does, especially a coaching staff like that that is virtually starting over again with a new system for new players, transforming the Mountaineers from the style Neal Brown established over the past six years and returning it to the hard-edge, speed driven style Rodriguez opened the 2000s with before hastily departing for a gypsy existence until his return.

The festivities once were billed as the spring game and it might draw anywhere from 5,000 to maybe 15,000 fans of very vanilla football which showed off the regulars briefly in the beginning but was mostly a stage for reserves and walk-ons to show what they had.

Each spring, it seemed, someone who was known only to the coaches, would put on a show, the last being Jahiem White, the running back who is expected to step into the same role the likes of Steve Slaton, Avon Cobourne, Quincy Wilson and Noel Devine had in the past.

But he’s been recovering from surgery this spring, so he wouldn’t have performed anyway.

So what do we have?

“We’ll have a little fun and we’ll do some stuff out there and engage with the fans, but we’re not going to do a true scrimmage or game from that standpoint,” Rodriguez said. “We just have so many other things we have to get done.”

This will be more of a carnival atmosphere than a football adventure.

They invite fans to arrive early at Almost Heaven Village with a kickoff concert by the Powell Brothers from 11 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. The gates to the village open at 10 a.m. The concert is on the east side of Milan Puskar Stadium between the Light Blue and Teal parking lots.

It’s all free but they are taking donations to West Virginia Medicine Children’s Hospital, which has benefitted from the spring game to the tune of $830,000 over the years.

Almost Heaven Village will include food trucks, inflatables, a DJ, yard games, photo opportunities, caricature artistry, balloon artistry and face painting, along with the WVU Spirit Squads.

The gates to the stadium open at noon for the football part of the day, which begins at 1 p.m.

There will be no radio or television broadcasts of this year’s event.

This, of course, is Rodriguez’s first year back coaching his alma mater and he is trying to change the image of his team to that which it had when he abruptly left 17 years ago while winning 11 games three years in a row.

He has spent the spring putting his system in, evaluating players and awaiting the opening of Part II of the transfer portal when he hopes to supplement his roster and fill holes, while expecting a number of players who feel they don’t fit into what he is doing to leave.

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