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MORGANTOWN -- Back on Dec. 29, 2025, West Virginia University football coach Rich Rodriguez hired veteran running back coach Jay Boulware.
The next day Rodriguez hired the even more veteran offensive line coach Rick Trickett to serve his third term with the Mountaineers.
You didn’t need a neon sign to tell you that something big was about to pop with West Virginia’s running game for the 2026 season, which opens on Saturday, Sept. 5, at home against Coastal Carolina.
Rodriguez, long hooked on the running game as the preferred mode of transportation for the football to the end zone, had suffered through a dismal return season as Mountaineer coach when his premiere running back, Jaheim White, was injured and out for the season early.
One after another, his replacements fell by the wayside until he finally had Curtis Jones Jr., a linebacker by trade, running the football in short-yardage situations.
And, as the off-season progressed, holdover running backs, including White, had fled through the portal, which may have been the only open hole they saw all season until the only returning running back was Andre Devine, the freshman son of former Mountaineer star Noel Devine, who is now part of Rodriguez’s staff.
You don’t bring in 81 years of coaching experience -- Trickett with 52 years and Boulware with 29 -- to coach no one, so sure enough, a week later Cam Cook, the nation’s leading rusher with 1,625 receiving yards, was transferring from Jacksonville State to run behind a Trickett O-line.
With Boulware coaching him, Rodriguez followed with a strong cast of freshmen and portal runners to complete an upgrade that was the equivalent of trading in a Ford for Ferrari.
Trickett had a long association with Rodriguez, so his hiring made sense, but hiring Boulware was like a farmer hiring a fox to guard the hen house, considering that during those 29 years as an assistant, he spent five of them as the running backs coach at Oklahoma.
During those seasons in the mid-2010s, six running backs had rushed for 1,000-yard seasons, five had earned first- or second-team All-Big 12 honors and three played in the NFL.
What’s more, Oklahoma had scored 270 points in five victories over WVU; that’s 54 points per game.
Rodriguez seemed to be setting the stage to make a “run” at a winning season at the least and maybe even a contending one in the Big 12, much of it banking on Cook delivering with Boulware molding him into the kind of running back Rodriguez loves to lean on and Trickett opening the paths for him to follow.
It’s Boulware’s credo that “Success is a journey. It’s not a destination” and that “no matter where they are, the players are continually on the line, trying to get better every single day.”
No one argues that Cook is a good running back, but Boulware is there to make him a great one.
And the difference between a good back and great back?
The answer was surprising in that Boulware didn’t define simply in terms of ability such as speed, power or vision.
“That’s a good question and it’s different for every back. Some guys have to be better at pass protection; some guys have to be better at making guys miss or understanding what they do. It’s all-encompassing. You need to be well-rounded. You need to be able to run, block and catch,” he said.
“I harp on our guys about that. I want them to be versatile. That’s what the NFL wants. That’s why I think I’ve had a number of backs picked up in the NFL, because they can do a number of things.”
He checks all those boxes.
“Cook is a really good receiver. Phenomenal. He catches the ball of the backfield,” Boulware said. “We have to run routes on the perimeter and he’s good there, too. There’re not any holes in his game. He can run, he can block, he can catch. Those are the things that make NFL caliber backs.
“That’s what we’re trying to get across to him and he is listening. He knows I’ve had a lot of NFL backs, knows who they are and that they have had success.”
WVU, of course, knows running backs can be a fragile commodity, finding out how important depth is when White went out last year and CJ Donaldson the season before that, to say nothing about Hall of Fame running back Steve Slaton ending collegiate career with an injury on the first carry of the 2008 Fiesta Bowl.
And so WVU has talent lined up behind Cook with freshmen Amari Latimer, Christopher Talley and Lawrence Autry transfer Martivious Boswell, whose speed is mind boggling.
Meanwhile, Boulware, who was an offensive lineman for Texas in the 1990s, is also a proven special team’s coach, an area where WVU needs help, returning neither a punter nor placekicker.