Program Building
December 06, 2005 02:03 PM | General
December 6, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – You’d think with three straight Big East championships, a couple of Gator Bowls, and now a BCS bowl-game berth in the bag that Rich Rodriguez’ West Virginia program has arrived. But according to the fifth-year coach, there’s still plenty more that needs to be done.
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| West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez gets a hug following his team's 28-13 win at South Florida to wrap up the school's third straight Big East title and first outright since 1993.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
“There are some things that we’re going to have to do at West Virginia if we want to continue to do this,” Rodriguez admitted Monday. “We just can’t hope that, OK, a Pat White is going to come along and break an 80-yard run or Steve Slaton jumps over five people and scores 20 touchdowns every year. To build a program you’ve got to keep climbing and climbing and doing everything that it takes to have a consistent top 25 team.
“We’re on that path but there is a whole laundry list of things I’ve got to keep pressing to try and do,” he said.
Rodriguez isn’t quite ready to divulge his list of things that he wants to see happen in the WVU program, but he is planning on addressing all of them in the coming years.
“There are probably five or six priority things but I’m going to reserve that until I have a chance to talk to the people at hand to let them know what they are,” Rodriguez said. “It’s not like we can’t compete with what we have right now because obviously we’re doing that. That’s part of the danger. People say that you’re winning right now, why do you need more?”
Most of what Rodriguez is interested in doing are infrastructural things typically not seen from the outside.
“There are things that are maybe it’s assumed that we have here that we don’t,” he said. “Just going down to Florida … how many players from their roster are an hour or two away? If we want to compete on a national level on a consistent basis the best way to do that is to have better players than the teams were playing against. The best way to do that is through sound recruiting: do a good job evaluating and bringing the right student-athletes into your program.”
West Virginia’s lack of population is always going to be an inhibiting factor, but it’s not something Rodriguez believes he can’t overcome. Nebraska and Oklahoma are two excellent examples of first-rate programs built in rural settings.
“Just because of population and sheer numbers we have to go into someone else’s backyard whether it’s Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida or wherever to fill up most of our roster -- not all of it because we can get some of it right here in the state,” Rodriguez said. “How do you do that? How do you go into someone else’s backyard and convince a young man to come to West Virginia when it’s 75 or 80 degrees at their place and we’re showing pictures of our place when the sun’s out? It’s not an easy thing to do. But once we get them here and they see the people and the things involved with the program then we have a shot. It’s always going to be a battle but that doesn’t mean it’s insurmountable.”
Rodriguez mentions true freshman running back Steve Slaton as a perfect example of the type of player the West Virginia program can produce with the right blend of evaluating, coaching and willingness on the player’s part to buy into the system and learn.
“He probably fits the mold of the typical West Virginia recruit,” Rodriguez said of Slaton, who finished the year with 924 yards and 16 total touchdowns in just eight full games. “He’s a guy that was maybe good enough to get some looks from some other places but he wasn’t on the national radar. We liked him and obviously he was a good fit for us.”
Quarterback Pat White, on the other hand, was a national-level prospect that Rodriguez was able to get on campus and sell him on the benefits of becoming a Mountaineer. White’s choice eventually came down to defending national champion LSU and West Virginia.
“Pat was on the other end,” Rodriguez said. “Some of the schools wanted him as a wide receiver. In fact most of them did and most of them offered but not as a quarterback. That was maybe one of the reasons we got him.”
Rodriguez isn’t convinced you need a roster full of five-star recruits, but he does think that getting a few here and there will help accelerate his program’s growth.
“I don’t know if you have to get all of the premier recruits to win. There is a reason why USC and Texas are playing in the national championship game. They’ve gotten a pretty good share of them, they’ve evaluated well and they’ve coached them up,” he said.
The key for West Virginia, according to Rodriguez, is to continue to correctly evaluate players and develop them once they get into the program.
“We’ve got to do a great job of developing our guys here and evaluating. Then have the ability once in a while to get that top guy that everybody wants. Some of those top guys that everybody wants don’t pan out or aren’t quite as good as their rankings. But a lot of them are. How do you get them? I don’t know if we can. But we’ve been told no before and we’ll keep getting told no,” he said.
Consequently, Rodriguez doesn’t buy into the notion of having a five-year plan that so many often refer to.
“Those five-year plans … in your fifth year you’re usually looking for a job,” he laughed. “When you’re a coach whether it’s professional, high school or college you want to build a program -- not a team. In the win-now society that we have there’s a lot of folks out there trying to build a team.
“We’ve always been about building a program.”
