MORGANTOWN — In the midst of Rich Rodriguez’s weekly coach’s show on Monday night, the talk got around to the fact that his West Virginia football team, in addition to being unable to win games in the Big 12, had not yet created an identity for itself.

Rodriguez, his team having absorbed three consecutive humbling, one-sided defeats in conference play and standing at 2-4 overall with TCU coming to town for Homecoming week, understood that his efforts to establish an identity as a team that played with a “hard edge” had not yet taken hold and was straightforward in offering an examination of what had transpired to date.

Certainly, he admits, he might have been premature in pushing the idea of playing with that “hard edge” from the start.

When asked about it, he seemed to be taken aback by the idea that maybe he had the West Virginia faithful expecting something that wasn’t there yet.

“There’s probably a little bit to that,” he said hesitantly. “You still have to have something you are going to build your program around and it has to be the message from Day 1 until the end. My expectation was probably higher than … er, I probably thought it would happen faster.”

You could almost hear the wheels turning as he processed everything about declaring it would be a team that played with a hard edge even as he was just taking over and didn’t even have all the pieces in place.

He noted that it might have been there for the special victory the Mountaineers scored over Pitt, but with what has happened since, could that really have been the case?

“Maybe I felt after the Pitt game I thought it was there, but it really wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, it was there to some degree but not ingrained in everything in the program like it needs to be.”

See, “hard edge” is more than a phrase. It’s an attitude, a way of existing. It is not a definition of talent but of the DNA out of which the program would be built.

“When it’s truly the culture we want and need and will have, you will not have one player loafing or one player taking a player being soft,” Rodriguez went on, trying to come up with the true definition of what he was selling.

“He might be a freshman playing for the first time, but by the time he gets to the game, he’ll know from the other players that’s not how we do stuff. Know what I mean? That’s probably the most disappointing thing that we as coaches have got to get corrected, that how we played in the Central Florida game effort wise, competitive wise — and the competitiveness was the biggest thing — can’t ever happen again.”

That, in the end, is the admission he has to get across to his players and that his fans need to understand.

“Hard edge” is a process, not something you can declare as the basis of your being.

“You’re right,” Rodriguez said. “My expectations that we could teach it better wasn’t right. We failed to get that done.”

Perhaps, his first stint as WVU’s coach in 2001 should have served as a lesson that would restrain his enthusiasm, for that did not start well and he won only three games that first season.

He was asked to compare the two, because times have changed so greatly, and what he inherited from Hall of Fame coach Don Nehlen was so much more similar to what he was trying to shape than what he inherited from Neal Brown that it had to be more difficult this time around.

“I remember the first year in Glenville when I went there in 1990, the first year we went there the record was bad. The culture was set during that year and got better every year after that,” he said.

“It was the same here. We’d lost a pretty good class, I think Rasheed Marshall got hurt so it was a struggle. But I remember our second off-season, it was like night and day, so different from the first off-season.”

And that, Rodriguez believes, is the path that will emerge this second time around.

“Our first off-season here wasn’t that bad, but it probably fooled me to the point that I was thinking we were getting into the culture right,” the coach said. “Obviously, we didn’t, by judging what’s happened in the last couple of games.”

But do not take that as waving a flag of surrender. Not at all.

“I’m not going to sit back and say we’ve got it right now, but we will have it,” he declared unflinchingly.

He expects his coaching staff to instill it along with him, but he also knows some of them are young and that they needed some direction in that area and that he’s always willing to be the “bad guy” through it all.

“I don’t mind being the bad guy,” he said. “I’m used to it, but I don’t want to always be the bad guy. What’s the movie with Al Pacino, ‘Scarface’? Yeah, he’s in the restaurant saying, ‘I’m the bad guy. I’m the bad guy.’

“I don’t mind being the bad guy as long as the culture is right. But I don’t want to always have to be.”