MORGANTOWN — Rich Rodriguez awoke Thursday morning with a good feeling after what he thought had been an acceptable opening day of practice for his West Virginia football team and expecting better things ahead. The schedule was much the same as the first day and they were still in shorts, so a step forward seemed inevitable.

“When I first woke up this morning, I was thinking, ‘We had a pretty good day yesterday and I’m going to have another good day where I’m not going to have to yell, will have a Popsicle break and get another Popsicle afterward,'” he said.

Practice ended and his voice was a little bit scratchy. Heaven had become … well, not Hell, but he found himself caught up in earning that money he was being paid by having to coach a team that didn’t take the expected step forward.

“I didn’t think we took great steps today,” Rodriguez began. “In fact, I thought we were a little bit soft at times.”

“Soft,” he had explained on the opening day of camp, was one of two four-letter words he didn’t want to have to use, the other being lazy, and now there he was pulling it out right away.

No time for Popsicles after a second day in shorts.

“You should be able to run even faster in shorts, and that’s what kind of got me riled up at times,” he said. “We’re in shorts, it’s nice weather, if you think this is hot and humid you haven’t lived anywhere else. I addressed it with the team.”

One suspects this was not a rather calm, father-to-son ‘learn something from me” discussion.

“There’s not a lot of experience there so I’m not expecting a handful of guys to grab leadership roles. That’s our job as coaches,” Rodriguez went on. “I really believe during practice, the leadership falls on the staff. We have to push them to the point where they learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. We’re not there yet.”

That’s “coach-speak”, yeah, but somewhere the phrase “learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable should have a place on every locker room wall, right next to that time worn phrase about it not being about the size of the dog in the fight but about the size of the fight in the dog.”

This shouldn’t be translated into any kind of warning that things are not right. As Rodriguez would admit not much later, there are no football coaches who don’t have Josh Allen or Pat Mahomes playing quarterback who are happy after the second day of summer practice.

But you always hope this year is different and that’s why Rodriguez was feeling good as he took the field.

“Yesterday was pretty good and I thought today we’d take another step and build on yesterday because that’s what a team should do. I don’t think that was the case,” Rodriguez said.

So how do you sum up two days of work?

“I’m disappointed, not discouraged,” Rodriguez said.

It probably is more a sign of the times we live in than anything else, as Rodriguez would go on to describe it in rather vivid detail over the next few minutes.

Someone pushed the button by asking how you coach toughness and wondering if players today are generally softer than they were in the old days.

That got the voice recorders rolling.

“I probably would agree with that generally overall,” Rodriguez began. “There’s plenty of guys who have toughness and a hard edge, whatever you want to call it. Now, understand this, I’m giving an opinion. I’m not going on a political rant or anything like that, but I think generally we’re softer as a society; we’re softer as athletes.”

You know, of course, what’s coming and it may not be a political rant, but it certainly was a strong statement about what’s gone on over the last quarter of a century in our society.

“I don’t necessarily blame anybody because all you hear from everybody is, ‘How do we make it easier for them?’ We want to make it easier for them rather than making it harder so they learn how to go through hard times,” Rodriguez said. “That’s what ‘hard edge’ is. It’s not a magical word and you are going to wake up and have it.

“There’s not one of you guys sitting in here,” he continued, speaking to the media, “who hasn’t had some adversity. So, hopefully you have the mental hard edge or toughness to get through it or have people around you who do that. I think it’s my responsibility to teach our guys that.

“It’s all not going to be strawberries and sunshine and roses and flowers,” Rodriguez said, getting into overdrive. “I told them today, my dad was a coal miner. He had one week off a year, I think. Work all day, get stuff all over you, come home, clean it off and work in the garden for four hours.”

Ah, the garden. Now we’re getting to how Rodriguez got his hard edge.

“As a kid, I worked in that garden a little bit,” he said. “As I got older, the more I worked there. The older I got, the bigger the garden. I HATED PULLING WEEDS! I’d rather do anything than pull weeds in the garden. You ever pull weeds around the beans? That’s miserable.

“I mean I would play every sport. I’d have gone and played lacrosse if we had it to get out of pulling weeds. The people in this state. Have you seen how they work? Whether they’re coal miners or anybody? It’s not always easy.”

If this was what Rodriguez had preached to his players, you knew right now that he had them wrapped around his finger.

“Have you been through this building,” he picked up again, talking about the Milan Puskar Center. “Do you know how we eat? Do you see all the services we have? They got it pretty good. They live in a fantasy world … coaches, too. We get these benefits.

“We live in a fantasy world. We want for nothing. You want food. You need medical help. You want job help. You want financial help. We got cold tubs, hot tubs.”

Sounds like a lot, but there was more coming. Rodriguez saved the best for this moment.

“We even got an ice cream machine. Just got it today. It’ll take two days to get it all cranked up. An ice cream machine! FREE! Probably will even have the sprinkles to put on. I mean, they got it pretty good. GOLLL-y!”

Now he was reaching the end.

“You ask my Mom, ‘What did Rich hate to do?’ She’ll tell you he hated to pull weeds. I did.”

So, he became a football coach, making like $5 million a year. It pays to have that “hard edge.”