WVU football working to sign more players to multi-year deals in coming weeks
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MORGANTOWN -- There have been a couple of times in the past couple of weeks when Rich Rodriguez mentioned West Virginia's open date or bye week, which comes after the Mountaineers head to TCU. WVU will have played eight straight games and needs a break. The bye will be time to focus on internal matters, like fixing the struggling defense. Most teams have had byes, but the Mountaineers had a later one.
Rodriguez is looking forward to time to focus on themselves, but he's not looking forward to a new addition to bye weeks, which is dealing with player contracts. With the combination of the transfer portal and NIL, contracts regarding player compensation have been a big topic of discussion. Cincinnati had issues with quarterback Brendan Sorsby leaving, and Washington quarterback Desmond Williams Jr. looked to transfer and had contract disputes, eventually returning back to the Huskies.
During the open date, WVU will try to extend certain players' deals or sign them to multi-year deals because if they aren't happy with the money, they can easily leave via the transfer portal after the season and play elsewhere. Rodriguez wants to get ahead of that.
"There’s going to be guys who we're going to want to try to sign multi-year contracts and stuff like that over the open date," Rodriguez said. "And so, there’s a lot of those conversations going to be taking place this time next week."
In an ideal world, Rodriguez signs all his impact players to multi-year deals because it prevents them from transferring at the end of the season. Rodriguez said he wants to work through as many contracts as he can during the bye.
Signing players to multi-year, even three-year deals is important to the way Rodriguez has built the program. He spent a lot of time and money on setting the foundation with a big high school recruiting class. Rodriguez wants to build his program on developing young players, who are cheaper initially than spending a lot each year in the transfer portal.
The only way to do that is to sign them to multi-year deals. The problem is agents are hesitant to do that.
"If you got the right guy, sign up to a three-year deal," Rodriguez said. "If we're confident with who he is. A lot of agents don’t want to do it that way because they know that they can try to play the market, but they gamble with that too."
Now, college athletes have agents, which 30-plus years ago, when Rodriguez started coaching, was a wild thought. The agents are there to negotiate contracts and handle these NIL deals.
Some agents are tough and give bad advice, like with what happened with Nico Iamaleava at Tennessee. He sat out hoping for more money and didn't get it, forcing him to transfer to UCLA.
"Most of the agents out there sometimes get a bad rep, and some of them are bad, but most of them are really good and want to do what’s best for their player or for their client,” Rodriguez said. “But you got to sort through all that."
Luckily, Rodriguez doesn't have to talk to agents. He can focus on this year’s team rather than what next year's team will look like. Rodriguez has personnel and general manager Chuck Lillie to handle it. Sometimes Rodriguez talks to agents if it’s at their request. He prefers not to.
Rodriguez wishes the distractions of discussing contracts during the middle of the season weren't the case. He wants the focus to be on just football. That ideal world could be coming down the road. The Protect College Sports Act passed the Senate in September, putting it into the House, getting closer and closer to becoming official. The bill creates guardrails on NIL, contracts and the transfer portal, so it's not chaos.
"This is where it's screwed up in our sport," Rodriguez said. "In the NFL, you don't worry about that. You know who's going to be a free agent and who's under contract. In college, most of the guys are on one-year deals, and so this is kind of the nutty part of it."
But right now, the reality of the sport is it’s the wild west. Rodriguez has to adapt to be competitive in the Power Four.
"But it’s part of it, and so I can’t just sit there and throw my hands up," Rodriguez said. "I mean, we’ve got to play the game, so to speak, and that’s what we’ll be doing the next few weeks.”