MORGANTOWN — Rich Rodriguez walked into Lawrence, Kan. Saturday with what amounted to a beaten up old Chevy pickup for a football team.
You know what we’re speaking about. That ol’ Chevy has rust eating through parts of the body, the muffler is hanging on for dear life and there’s a bumper sticker on the back that reads: My other car is a hearse.
That’s the current shape of the Mountaineers, which fell to Kansas, 41-10, while averaging a ho-hum 4.5 yards per play. It was 3.2 yards per play until WVU quarterback Jaylen Henderson got into the game in the fourth quarter and directed a 95-yard scoring drive when the game was out of question. WVU’s first six possessions ended with punts. Only two of those six picked up a first down.
The answer to the how or why is found in West Virginia’s injury report. Running back Jahiem White is out for the season. His replacement, Tye Edwards, who sparked the Mountaineers to an overtime win last week against Pitt, was injured and out for this game, too.
Rodriguez may be the innovator of the current state of affairs when it comes to today’s hyper-tempo offenses found in college football, but there is no game planning known to anyone that can turn an old Chevy into something it’s not.
You don’t have a whiff of a running game, you’re not going to compete at a high level in major college football. That’s true for 95% percent of college football coaches, which includes Rodriguez.
If you don’t have a running game, you better have a game-changer at quarterback. For now, WVU doesn’t exactly have that, either. And so, WVU’s margin for error is just too razor thin at the moment.
It needs perfect offensive execution at least 80% of the time. It needs a defense that doesn’t blow assignments and can tackle someone in the open field and not get juked out of their cleats.
Neither really happened against the Jayhawks (3-1, 1-0 Big 12), who were once the joke of the Big 12 – football, not men’s hoops – but have won two of the last three meetings against WVU (2-2, 0-1). As long as Kansas quarterback Jaylon Daniels remains healthy, Kansas has a shot in the Big 12 this season.
“Nothing was good,” Rodriguez said. “Coaching was not good. Playing was not good. I thought we were OK during our week of practice, but evidently not good enough. We’ve got a lot to work on.”
There is a point to this old Chevy analogy, which is to say that truck, while maybe an eyesore, that darned thing is also durable and dependable. You walk out to your driveway when it’s two degrees outside and the snow is piled up to your chest, that truck is going to start and get you to work.
The last thing anyone needs to worry about with this WVU football program is players simply going through the motions. That may not sound like much of a silver lining today. It may not be one come late October, either, if these Big 12 losses begin to pile up one after another.
Still, that truck will start. It will go from point A to B. Might not be pretty all the time, but you’ll have a group of guys on that field each week determined as ever to get the program to its next destination.
Rodriguez called it growing pains a couple of weeks back, the same types of growing pains he went through back in 2001 at WVU, which was a tough 3-8 season.
Here’s the $64 million question, though: Do you put blind faith that WVU follows the same path as it did in Rodriguez’s first tenure at the school?
The improvement was steady in those old days. The program continued to get a yearly upgrade, beginning with that beaten up Chevy and finishing with an impressive-looking sports car by the time Rodriguez left for Michigan in 2007.
The game was different then, so were the circumstances. The Big 12 is expanding and will likely continue to expand in the years to come. That expansion won’t come out of neccesity, meaning another conference poaching a few of its members.
That was exactly the story back in the day with the Big East. That league was diminishing just as Rodriguez’s Mountaineers were rising. WVU became a big fish in a small pond.
The Big 12 is no small pond.
True, it’s also no super power of a league like the SEC or Big Ten. It’s totally up for grabs at the moment. Arizona State won it a year ago in its first year in the conference and after getting picked to finish last. Still, the Big 12’s place at the college football table is much more desirable than the Big East ever had it once Miami jumped ship to the ACC.
There’s NIL money being thrown all over the place. Coaches have to spend nearly as much time today figuring out how to divide up dollars for players as part of revenue sharing as they do figuring out their depth chart.
These were never issues 23 years ago.
Rodriguez’s program-building skills face a much more uphill climb this time around. That was never more evident than when Daniels turned a fourth-and-1 play into a 41-yard touchdown pass just three minutes into the game.
This old Chevy, we’ve seen it before. If Rodriguez is somehow able to turn that truck into a mint condition Cadillac again, it would be one hell of a story. Unfortunately, that’s a story for further down the road.
