MORGANTOWN — As you might guess, the quarterback room in Milan Puskar Stadium is not the happiest of places in town these days as coach Rich Rodriguez has gone through four starting quarterbacks and has his number savaged by an endless string of injuries.

A week ago, for the first time since 1952, a true freshman started at quarterback in Scotty Fox and that could happen again as TCU comes to town for Saturday’s 6 p.m. Homecoming game.

They are lost in a sea of criticism and cynicism but they have within their room an invaluable asset who has not only seen similarly dark days but gotten through them, becoming what many would say is WVU’s best ever quarterback and certainly the one who defined the position as it is played in the Rodriguez offense that they are having so much trouble dealing with.

You know his name, Pat White, now an assistant quarterback coach, to say nothing of being a man who retired as college football’s all-time leading rusher as a quarterback and as then the only QB to start and win four bowl games.

He’s been there and is currently trying to pass his wisdom on to the Mountaineer quarterbacks.

“I’ve been told ‘no’ a lot or looked at as if I were incapable,” White said Tuesday night as a guest on Rodriguez’s coach’s show. “I was a lefty. I was 6-foot, barely 175 pounds coming out of high school and if you looked at the rest of the quarterback world it looked a little bit different. I felt I had something to prove not only to the rest of the world, but most importantly to myself, that I was capable.”

He spent his freshman year redshirting and then didn’t start in the early days of his redshirt freshman season, playing behind Adam Bednarik.

There came a day when it got to him, when he was ready to give the game up and move into baseball, which may well have been his first love and which certainly saw him have enough talent to be a high draft choice.

He was going through much of what the quarterbacks today are going through.

“Things have been difficult,” he said. “They’ve been getting yelled at, cursed at, and when you lose it’s kind of hard to see anything positive,” White said. “I just reminded them this morning to refuse to allow anything inside of the game or outside of the game to take away the joy from the game.

“I tried to be candid with them. I let them know that there was a time I didn’t think I would ever be a quarterback here at West Virginia.”

He needed support.

“I leaned on people I trusted, in particular my father,” White said. “He gave me some great advice. He told me to go out that week, the week of the Louisville game, practice every play as if I was starting. Then, at the end of the week, if I still felt the same, then he would go with what I asked for.”

White came that close to ending his football career right there.

But fate has a way of setting things right.

Midway in the second half of the Louisville game, with WVU seemingly beaten, Bednarik suffered a nasty ankle injury.

“I came in and played the rest of my career,” White said, having joined Steve Slaton in the backfield for an amazing comeback that led to a triple-overtime victory that changed not only the game result but history.

And so it is that he offers what he learned to today’s quarterbacks.

“It goes back to refusing to allow anything to take the joy away from a childhood game, something that only lasts a certain amount of time in your lifetime. You have to make the most of it,” he said.

It will, he says, get better if they give it the chance with the same kind of dedication he showed.

“I was fortunate; I got a year in the system before I stepped on the field,” he said, referring to his redshirt year that Fox has not had a chance to use. “This is each of their first year in the system and we’re expecting them to be perfect, and it’s not going to be. Right? They’re still learning what coach wants and getting used to his philosophy and some of the reads.”

It comes with repetitions, so many repetitions.

“Reps,” he said. “It takes many reps and getting different looks, seeing different bodies and adjusting to how they play. Opponents catch up and learn what you are trying to do and adjust their game, so you have to play chess with them.

“The quarterbacks here are all capable. They all believe they are the starting quarterback, which is good for the room. They all get along. They all have a decent relationship with each other. It seems like they all root for each other.”

While the game has changed since he played back in the first decade of this century, it is mostly the same, built on the tempo that Rodriguez uses because it emphasizes his hard-edged, aggressive personality.

“But, at the end of the day, it’s about the zone; putting that defensive end in a bind and making him have to make a decision. Reach and ride, man. Reach and ride,” he said.

As in any profession, experience brings wisdom with it at quarterback.

White admits that his confidence was always there, that he knew right from the beginning that he would succeed.

“If I can be quite candid with you, it was probably the first padded practice I had in Morgantown,” White said when asked when he knew he had what it took. “I made a couple of plays and just felt more confident.

“At first, I didn’t know what I was doing but I had older guys, who had spent time in the system on the sideline who would coach me through when I came off. Once we develop this thing, we’ll have older guys there who will take the time and explain to them what we are trying to accomplish. Right now, everyone’s trying to figure it out.”

Right now, he and Rhett Rodriguez, the coach’s son and the top quarterback assistant who grew up and played in the system, are the wise, older heads there for support.

He knows he was coached hard and it worked.

“I loved every aspect of being coached. I come from a long line of educators. Coaching is teaching and teaching is coaching and it’s been my entire life. I’m fortunate enough to be in this position to coach,” he said.

Getting to that position wasn’t easy. Drafted in the second round by Miami’s Bill Parcells, he was seen as a “wildcat” style quarterback but his career was cut short by concussions.

For a while he was lost as to what to do. Coaching wasn’t in the plans at the time.

But former teammate Ryan Stanchek, an offensive tackle who had gone into coaching and was an offensive coordinator at Alcorn State, eventually convinced White to give it a try.

“That goes back to the statement I made to the players about refusing to allow anything to take away the love and joy for the game away from you. Obviously, my career playing in Miami didn’t go as I wanted it to.

“For a while, that lull in my success took away the joy for me, but I was fortunate enough to have it come back when I went to Washington, even though that ended after the second week of the season.

“I didn’t ever think I would get into coaching. Stanchek asked me in 2016 to come coach, but I had a young daughter in West Virginia and felt I wanted to build a relationship with her, so I told him it wasn’t the right time.

“In 2017, he asked me again, and I gave him the same answer. Then he asked me again in 2018, but before he asked me he said, ‘Listen, I’m going to ask you until you say yes.’ I took that as a sign the Almighty that this is what I’m supposed to be doing, so I went with him in 2018.”

The light was lit.

“I’m loving every second of it,” White said. “I’m thankful for my family. They supported me from the time I was on any athletic field, whether it was baseball or football, and as long as I’m happy, they’re happy, and hope I can pass that same sentiment on to my two daughters and two boys.

“As long as they are doing what’s right and being productive members of society, most importantly, as long as they’re happy, I’m happy.”