Weather has been too nice for Rodriguez
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MORGANTOWN -- As if West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez didn’t have enough to worry about as he completely recasts his team from last season’s outmoded 4-8 model into a sleek new representative to send off into deep waters of Big 12 football, he finds himself caught up worrying about things that go far beyond even that.
While most of the top contenders are trying to fill in the holes left in their starting lineups by graduation and portal transfers, finding a few starters and strengthening their bench, Rodriguez is starting virtually from scratch.
You ask him for a depth chart and he can’t give you a starting lineup and the Sept. 5 opener against Coastal Carolina is no longer sneaking up on him but instead bearing down like a runaway freight train.
While he claims he’d like to break records on how many players he will play in a game, he has defined game-ready players as those who he feels he can win with, setting that as the No. 1 requirement for playing time.
The problem is that unlike a Broadway play that gets to work the bugs with the cast out with trial runs in Sheboygan or an NFL team that plays an exhibition season, he has to come out of the starting gate running right into the season, and they have done him no favors giving him a schedule that has eight games in the first eight weeks.
It is a test not only of his starting lineups, which are anything but set, but of his team’s depth, which will take a while to work out.
"How many new starters have we got? 18, 19, 20. Maybe 21? Maybe 22? We might have 22 new starters. Excuse me, let's count the punter and a kicker. We might have 24-for-24. I kid you not. It is a possibly. But we might have less than that,” Rodriguez said, perhaps exaggerating the magnitude of the task to make his point.
But it far less of an exaggeration than you will hear from both sides during this year’s political midterm elections.
Position battles are raging now and there is far more talent and experience on hand this season than there was last year when they got a late start on team building.
"Our guys know, we are still rolling 1's and 2's. None of these guys have played a game but you are getting an idea now and we'll get an idea at the end of this week. OK, these are the guys we think we are ready to win with. If we only have 22, 11 on both sides, we are going to be in trouble. I am expecting 50 or 52. I know that is kind of a goal, a wish and a dream. But that's what we'll get to.
"You've got to build depth. Depth is probably harder to build, as crazy as it sounds, it is harder to build now in the money era, quality depth than ever before. A lot of guys want to go and start and get paid a little bit more and all that. But I do think we should have better depth this year. I feel better about our depth this year. We purposely tried to address that, just in case we have bad luck."
But you don’t know what have until you see them against other teams, against different offenses and defenses and where the quarterback can be tackled and the stands are full. It’s a different game then and, in reality, different players who react to the situation in practice one way and in a game another.
You try to get ready in camp -- and once upon a time you could do so with two-a-days and physical workouts in searing summer heat.
Those days are gone with leather helmets and Don Nehlen-type drawn-up plays.
You know what they say about how everybody talks about the weather but no one does anything about it? Rodriguez is Exhibit A this year.
"We have had no heat, no humidity. It has been 75 degrees, which has been beautiful,” he said. “We haven't had IVs and stuff. But I hope in the next week we get a practice that it is 95 and humid. Something happens in Morgantown, West Virginia and the humidity says I am coming from the south and I am landing in Morgantown. And you better get your IVs ready and your Gatorade and all that because we're coming after you. I miss one day of that, at least one day where they can't wait to jump in the cold tub afterwards. We've had none of it. It has been like a vacation."
That makes it harder to get into shape and hard to analyze who rises up against difficult situations when you are sore and sweaty and tired.
Rodriguez wasn’t happy about a high number of minor soft-tissue injuries and one question was posed as if he might place blame on the strength staff for that, he was openly irritated.
“That’s a fair question because that’s the first thing we look at -- are we doing something or something we need to look at in the strength room? I evaluate everything, and I evaluate what we do in the strength and conditioning, and I think it’s just 100% bad luck,” Rodriguez said. “I really like what our strength staff is doing. Our medical staff is top-notch. I don’t even get into that; they know what they’re doing, and they tell me who can go, who can’t go.”
The result, though, has been things haven’t really been tough to accomplish all Rodriguez would want, even going so far the other day as to characterize a freshman scrimmage as a “pillow fight,” hardly the hard edge he wants his team to portray.
There’s been all that and then looking into the hard grind of the schedule, which he compared to 2006.
That was odd not so much for a regular game every Saturday for eight weeks as it because that year they played three Thursday night games, a Friday game and Monday bowl game, which played roughshod with practice schedules.
That team could handle just about anything as it was the middle team in a row of three consecutive 11-win seasons.