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MORGANTOWN -- A week before West Virginia opens fall camp of Year 2 of Rich Rodriguez 2.0, about the only thing certain about the product that he will put on the field is the uncertainty of what lies ahead.
Call it a sign of the times.
RichRod’s Homecoming a year ago was more the stuff nightmares are made from than dreams, leading him to a 4-8 season that avoided being a complete flop by a revenge victory in the Backyard Brawl against Pitt.
It did little for his record, but it certainly did wonders for persona and kept the local off his tail.
RichRod has some breathing room in this second season and neither Penn State nor Pitt to contend with, but he has to find a way to shape a nearly entirely-made-over roster into a football team.
There’s good and bad in that. The good is that it’s not last year’s roster and in this day of fast change artists, Rome can be built in a day.
The question is if that day is today.
Certainly, improvement is expected, by fans who matter far less than by RichRod and his boss man, Wren Baker.
“I expect us to be a lot better,” he said at Big 12 Media Day earlier this month which probably has allowed him to sleep a bit sounder and which may help sell some tickets, which should help Baker’s sleeping habits, too.
Rodriguez says he learned from the troubled first year back at WVU.
“I can’t look back on it because I just get pissed because we played so bad, but you learn a little something every day, and we kind of knew some of the issues that were going to come up,” Rodriguez explained. “We didn’t know the quarterback situation would have so many guys hurt and the running back situation ...
“We learned a lot, and I think we made some adjustments in who we brought in and then, obviously, we had another roster flip this year, but I feel so much more comfortable because we have had everybody except for four or five guys throughout the whole spring and we just look more athletic,” he added.
It’s expected that a coach will improve from Year 1 to Year 2. After all, Neal Brown went from 5-7 to 6-4 in Year 2, but that was the COVID year so it may not mean much.
What means more, though, is that Rodriguez jumped from 3-8 his first time around to 9-3 the second time.
There was an upward trend at Michigan, too, although there had to be after a 3-9 first year, going 5-7 the second year. The third season he had a winning record at 7-6 but also a one-way ticket out of town as outside complications added to his dismissal.
At Arizona he started at 8-5, following that up with an 8-5 record the second season and then went 10-4, but he couldn’t maintain that upward dynamic and was a combined under .500 for the next three seasons at 17-21.
History at West Virginia doesn’t give us much guidance as he heads into the second season, in part because the game is completely different in today’s world than it has ever been before.
Also, he hasn’t settled into what it is finally going to be, so there isn’t much of a map to follow other than the one that tells you that when you get to the fork in the road, you have to come with more money to stock your roster.
Going all the way back to 1908-09, WVU coaches have a 115-107-1 record in first years of new coaches improving to 122-87-8, which is only seven more wins but a better winning percentage in second years.
Most interesting, perhaps, is that Dana Holgorsen had a 10-3 first season with that 70-33 Orange Bowl win over Clemson but he had inherited a team with Geno Smith throwing the ball and Stedman Bailey and Tavon Austin catching it and he fell off to 7-6 the second year.
Hall of Fame coaches Don Nehlen and Bobby Bowden had different experiences, Nehlen opening his WVU career at 6-6 and putting a 9-3 year on top of that while Bowden’s first year after replacing Jim Carlen went from 8-3 to 7-6 the second season and way, way back in 1925 Ira Errett Rodgers debuted at 8-1 but slipped to 6-4.
Rodriguez does have something working for him and that is his team universally isn’t expected to do much better than .500, if that good, but a lot of those people didn’t see just how good his good teams were and he seems to be trying to build the same structure he had the first time around.