MORGANTOWN — West Virginia signed a lot of players during the early signing period. 49 high school and junior college players signed their letters of intent, which was the most in the county. Rich Rodriguez said he’d have a big class, and he wasn’t lying.

WVU’s class didn’t come from one area. Rodriguez didn’t just hit the local states for recruits. The Mountaineers’ 49 players came from 25 different states. Half of the states in the United States have a player committed to West Virginia.

“As we walked in here somewhere, like 43-44 guys from 24 states,” Rodriguez said on National Signing Day on Dec. 3. “It’s a big class. There used to be a limit, of course, on it, and now there’s not. Being from a smaller state, we cast a wider net. I thought our guys did a good job with that.”

Rodriguez and staff did hit the local states pretty hard. The top two recruits, offensive lineman Kevin Brown and safety Matt Sieg, are both from Pennsylvania, and Sieg is just under an hour up the road. There are three players from Ohio, and just two from West Virginia.

West Virginia is a harder state to recruit in because there aren’t too many high-level prospects from the state. There are just seven who are rated on 247Sports. Rodriguez added two of the top four, tight end Xavier Anderson and wide receiver Malachi Thompson, so he does do his due diligence in the state.

“We have such a small state that people go, ‘Why didn’t you recruit West Virginia more?” Rodriguez said. “We are recruiting the state, but it’s such a small state that you have to go outside to really fill your roster. But, there’s a couple others that we’re still looking at in our state as well.”

Most of Rodriguez’s recruits come from the south. Florida (5) and Alabama (4) are the two states that WVU added the most recruits from. It makes sense, Rodriguez has spent a lot of time in the south. Rodriguez was just at Jacksonville State, in Alabama, spent time at Ole Miss and Louisiana-Monroe as an offensive coordinator and at Tulane and Clemson as an assistant coach.

WVU has two players this cycle from the same school, quarterback John Johnson and receiver Greg Wilfred, in Louisiana, which could be a hotspot in the future for Rodriguez. Rodriguez was at Tulane and Louisiana-Monroe, so he has some connections down there.

“Used to go there quite a bit,” Rodriguez said. “The school where we got two guys from, I know they’re coaches, and know the school, but we haven’t really gone in there. I haven’t gone in there. I used to go all the time when I had Calvin Magee on my staff. Calvin was the guy. I told the coach down there that in the car, he got one of the best programs in the state.”

There are a lot of talented players in Louisiana, too. The fourth-rated recruit in the class of 2026 is from Louisiana, and the second-rated recruit in 2027 is also from down there. Obviously, LSU dominates that area as the only Power Four school in the state, but Rodriguez hopes to pick up the scraps on the players that don’t go to the Tigers, who are still talented.

“I said, ‘Man, we’re dropping the ball,’ because you don’t really area recruit as much anymore,” Rodriguez said. “But I said, we need to have a presence down there, because we know people down there. They know West Virginia… We’ll probably kind of go to New Orleans every year now, because a lot of those guys, they’re not getting an LSU offer, they’ll go elsewhere, because there’s no other Power Four in the state. Louisiana high school football is really good, so we got a couple guys from one of the best teams in the state from there.”

The only issue with recruiting players from down south and as far as California is pitching them the state of West Virginia, and Morgantown. It’s an obscure state, and if you haven’t been there, there’s a lot you might not know.

Rodriguez hasn’t had too much trouble pitching the school because who could be a better salesman than someone who grew up in Grant Town, West Virginia? As Rodriguez said, West Virginia is tourism-heavy.

“We got a lot more guys on our team from out of state than in state because we’re such a small state that we don’t have as many Division I Power Four players as a bigger state would have,” Rodriguez said. “But when you come here, and they all shake their heads when I talk to them, I’m talking about parents and players, I said, ‘Isn’t the people really friendly?’ Isn’t this a great place to visit? And I say, ‘They’re not just putting on the show. That’s what West Virginia is.'”