The more you look into the 2025 season for West Virginia football — Year 1 for Rich Rodriguez — the worse it gets. The Mountaineers went 4-8, won two Big 12 games and lost to Ohio, who is a Group of Five school. The last time Rodriguez’s squad took the field, Texas Tech came to Morgantown and won 49-0.
It was one of the worst seasons in recent years.
Realistically, the season was set up for failure. Rodriguez was hired in December, so he couldn’t have much of a recruiting class, and he had a mass exodus of players leave through the transfer portal. He attempted to patch holes to make the team competitive in his first year by adding 70-plus players, which was some of the most in all of college football.
With a new coaching staff implemented, bringing a new scheme, it was too much in not a lot of time, causing one of the worst seasons in Mountaineers history.
Rodriguez learned a lot from Year 1, and pledges that the 2026 season should be better.
“As tough as it was at times last year, I think it was our biggest learning year going forward to this year,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez has a couple of points to back his claim, starting with having a full year under his belt to establish a coaching staff and build a hefty, almost 50-player recruiting class. He also brought in a promising group of transfer portal players.
WVU is deeper. Instead of in 2025, where no offensive lineman took a starting snap, Rodriguez has multiple who have started full seasons in college football. He has defensive players who have years of experience and running back Cam Cook, who had the most production out of any running back in 2025, to anchor his run-heavy offense.
Production was key to building this roster to “win now.”
“We’re able to get competition at just about every position,” Rodriguez said. “We look more for production as opposed to potential. Guys that had been very productive, whether it’s at a Group of Five school or what have you, that started and played in college games. I thought our staff did a good job of that.”
There are some returners, but not many. Rodriguez lost a load of players in the portal, especially ones who might’ve started in 2026, like defensive lineman Hammond Russell and wide receiver Cam Vaughn. The returners, like offensive lineman Nick Krahe and linebacker Ben Cutter, along with the returning staff, have worked hard this spring, showing the new faces how WVU operates.
“The few returning players we have coming back have done a great job of helping us establish the culture, reestablish the culture, I guess you could say,” Rodriguez said. “I feel pretty confident we’re better all the way around.”
Bringing in Cook and some of the 4-star recruits who were added this winter cost money in this era of college football. Money Rodriguez said he has more than in 2025. WVU has the full revenue share this year, according to Rodriguez.
But money isn’t everything, he learned. Texas Tech had one of the most expensive rosters in the sport last year and was bounced in its first game of the College Football Playoff. The Red Raiders won the Big 12, but still, they had higher expectations. There were other teams, like Penn State and Clemson, who had expensive rosters and weren’t even ranked in the top 25 at the end of the year.
Rodriguez learned how to better manage money going into Year 2.
“Where college athletics is at, college football in general, you’ve got to be able to manage money,” Rodriguez said. “You’re paying players, so you got to pay the right guys. If you make a mistake, you got to own up to it and make adjustments. If you made the right move, you got to make sure you lock them in. Money helps solve a lot of problems. You can make more mistakes if you got more money, but you still got to make the right decisions on staffing and on players and play calls, all that kind of stuff.”
The most important piece to Rodriguez’s claim of being better is that he feels everyone is more aligned. Not just him, the coaching staff and the players. Everyone from the top down, including the WVU board, president Michael T. Benson, athletic director Wren Baker and even the fans.
That’s the key.
“To win in college athletics, you have to be aligned all the way from the top down,” Rodriguez said. “We have that in West Virginia. We are aligned with where we want to go to.”
At this point, in early July, you can say a whole lot to draw hype to the team. Words don’t mean anything until the team is out on the field. Right now, and based on last year, there’s not a whole lot of belief in the squad being a whole lot better. WVU is tied for the fifth-worst odds, according to FanDuel Sportsbook, to win the Big 12.
But no one will truly know, even the experts, if WVU is better until Sept. 5, when the Mountaineers open their season at home against Coastal Carolina.
“I feel confident we’ll be a lot better this year,” Rodriguez said. “Probably a lot better than people predict, but we’ve got to prove that first.”
