File photo WVU enters the 2025 campaign with a lot of unknowns. The Mountaineers begin the season Aug. 30 at home against Robert Morris.

MORGANTOWN — Before the start of a football season, the word expectations is thrown around a lot. The expectations for a team vary from school to school, but every coach and player will say first, it’s winning the conference and then getting a bid for the College Football Playoff, and ultimately to win the National Championship.

For West Virginia, the expectations depend on who you ask.

If you just look at the sportsbooks, the expectations for WVU aren’t very high. DraftKings has WVU’s win total set at 5.5 with the under favored, and FanDuel has the same, which is actually up from early in the spring. WVU has the fourth-worst odds to win the Big 12 at +4,000 in DraftKings, and the third-worst on FanDuel at +4,300. UCF, Oklahoma State and Arizona are the only teams with worse odds.

Then, there’s what the beat writers and other college football writers think of the team. Most don’t think too highly. The Big 12 got rid of the preseason poll, but most polls have the Mountaineers picked anywhere from last to a high of third-to-last in the conference. In the Dominion Post’s poll, WVU is predicted to finish 14th.

However, the sentiment is a lot different if you read the emails responding to the Dominion Post’s rankings, ride in an Uber from the stadium, or sit at a Morgantown bar for a couple of minutes. Everyone around Morgantown sees Rich Rodriguez as the savior and will put the Mountaineers right back on the map.

“If you think that any Rich Rodriguez team is going to finish 14th in any league, then you don’t know squat about college football,” a reader of the Dominion Post said.

Those expectations put a lot of pressure on Rodriguez to perform in the first year. If you look at his first season back in 2001, he didn’t have immediate success. Rodriguez finished 3-8 in his first season with the Mountaineers.

The 2025 team is a lot different than that squad, too. Rodriguez has a transfer portal-built team, with 70-plus new faces, with just last year’s film under different schemes to go off of. There are some Jacksonville State players from the team he coached last year, but that’s a minority compared to the rest of the 115 players.

Since Brad Lewis was back in 2001 from the 2000 season, Rodriguez had a strong idea of his quarterback in his first year at WVU. Rodriguez’s starting quarterback is completely up in the air for 2025. He hasn’t narrowed anything down from multiple options.

There’s a lot of unknown for his 2025 squad, which makes the expectations all over the place.

Most of the talk of expectations from outside noise can affect a team in different ways. Some coaches and players listen to it, and others don’t. West Virginian and college football legend Nick Saban famously called the outside noise “rat poison,” whether it was good or bad.

Even though it might not seem like he would, Rodriguez does listen to the outside noise and agrees with the Morgantown natives.

“If you’re picked last or next to last, like we’ve been picked last or next to last in the Big 12, you might mention and say, I think we’re gonna be a little better than that,” Rodriguez said. “Maybe try to use it as some motivation.”

Expectations are a good conversation starter in the offseason, and it might be fun to create educated projections of what might happen, but realistically, everyone’s just guessing and nobody knows for sure.

Rodriguez thinks the same, and in the heat of the moment, what people think of his team won’t matter during the game.

“But I think when the stuff hits the fan, and you’re in the middle of a tight game in the third quarter, and you’re going at each other, I don’t think that at that time, you worry about where you’re picked in the poll,” Rodriguez said. “You’re going to default to your level of training, no matter where you’re picked or no matter what people think of you. Our level of training has to go up, because that’s where you’re going to bench the default to.”