100 and Counting
October 09, 2007 11:00 PM | General
October 9, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Last Saturday at Syracuse, West Virginia University football coach Rich Rodriguez won his 100th career game. The setting at the Carrier Dome was a dramatic contrast from the modest beginnings Rodriguez had as a 24-year-old first-year head coach at Salem College in 1988.
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| WVU Director of Athletics Ed Pastilong presents WVU coach Rich Rodriguez with the game ball from his 100th victory last Saturday against Syracuse.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
Rodriguez learned quickly that the coaching business can be a cruel one. He went 2-8 his first year at Salem and during the summer preparing for his second season he was informed that the school was dropping the sport.
“You went 2-8 and then you get your program dropped and you’re thinking that there aren’t a whole lot of folks that are going to hire a guy that just got his program terminated,” Rodriguez recalled Tuesday afternoon. “That’s your first thought. My thought after that is if I stay in coaching after this … program dropped after the first year we went 2-8, two weeks before my wedding and my wife still said yes …
“I spent three and a half weeks trying to find 80-some players a place to go play football. For some reason they thought the guys still wanted to stay there and they didn’t,” Rodriguez said. “And then finding five or six coaches a place to go to, finding myself a job and then getting ready to go get married.”
Rodriguez and his wife Rita didn’t have a honeymoon. They couldn’t afford it.
“I thought to myself, if I still want to stay in coaching after all of this then I’m a lifer,” Rodriguez said. “There was no question in my mind that I was passionate about staying in coaching. I just didn’t know it would be such a long time before I would be a head coach again.”
To a 24-year old with only small bills in his pocket, a year and a half probably would seem like an eternity. After a year serving as an unpaid volunteer assistant on West Virginia’s coaching staff in 1989, Rodriguez jumped at the chance of taking a job nobody else wanted at Glenville State.
“It may have surprised some folks but I think there were only three of us that interviewed and the other two had never coached before,” Rodriguez joked. “I think I kind of got that one by default.”
Glenville was in bad shape. When Rodriguez first opened the door to the coaches’ office he discovered dog droppings on the floor. It was an appropriate metaphor for the Pioneer football program.
Rodriguez learned quickly that if his second coaching job was going to last longer than his first he was going to have to improvise. Much of the innovative shot-gun spread offense that just about everyone in the country is using in some form today Rodriguez developed on the dirt and sparse patches of grass that made up Glenville State’s only practice field.
“You taped the ankles, you lined the fields and you cut the grass,” said Dusty Rutledge, a member of Rodriguez’s Glenville staff and now West Virginia University’s video coordinator. “I can remember once during spring ball the weather was so bad that we couldn’t go on the practice field or the game field so we went and got five or six push-mowers and used one of Ike Morris’ fields.”
The team got dressed in the locker room and the coaches assigned players to carpool their teammates the four or five miles it took to get to their makeshift practice facility.
“The bridge to the field was out so the whole team had to walk across one of those sway bridges across a creek that had risen so high that it washed out the road to get to the practice field,” Rutledge chuckled. “The whole team had to park their cars on the side of the road and walk across that bridge to get to where we were going to practice.”
Rutledge says that famous shotgun zone-read play that everyone is using so successfully today really came about by accident.
Quarterback Jed Drenning botched a handoff to his running back in a game against Concord College, and instead of falling down he instinctively decided to follow the running back through the hole, using him as a lead blocker.
“It was a broken play,” Drenning said. “I kept the ball and I’m not really a guy known for my running acumen.”
Rodriguez saw right away the value of what Drenning did - or didn't do - and what an athletic quarterback could do with the ball on that play (Patrick White and Tim Tebow, you can thank Jed Drenning for screwing up a handoff because that's where the zone-read play came from).
“Coaching in small college like I did, you don’t have the eyes upstairs in the box so you see everything from the field so much better,” Terry Bowden explained in an interview with Fox Sports Pittsburgh’s Dan Potash a few years ago. “You train yourself to see it. The guys that start out in the big leagues - they don’t understand how to see the game from the field. Rich sees it.”
“His first year as a head coach he was an I-back guy at Salem,” Rutledge recalled. “They were running power isos, sprint-draw and play-action pass. The first year (at Glenville) they had a ton of sacks because they were running the run-and-shoot principles and his linemen were having problems blocking it. He modified the protections to help his offensive linemen.”
“I went 1-7-1 my first year at Glenville and it might have been the best coaching job I ever did,” Rodriguez said.
West Virginia defensive backs coach Tony Gibson was part of Rodriguez’s first recruiting class at Glenville in 1991.
“Coach Rod always stuck with this motto: those who stay will be champions,” Gibson said. “At that time he had Dean Hood who is now defensive coordinator at Wake Forest and Jimbo Fisher … all those guys were on that staff.
“They had something that you wanted to be part of. They were all young and energetic. They recruited you hard and they believed what they told you. I got there and three years later we played for the national championship.”
Rodriguez won 45 games in eight years at Salem and Glenville, 42 of those wins coming in his last six years. In 1996, he took his offense to a national stage at Tulane, and then on to Clemson with Tommy Bowden before being hired at West Virginia University in 2000.
Today, Rodriguez has transformed his alma mater into an annual Top 10 contender.
“Obviously if you coach enough years you’ll get enough wins,” Rodriguez said. “It’s my 15th year. I hadn’t made a play in any of those games and I’ve had great staffs everywhere I’ve worked. Here it extends beyond the football coaches. It’s the support personnel, the administration and a whole lot of folks.”
Drenning, however, says it all starts with the man at the top.
“I played for him and I coached with him and learned all of his schemes and there are times during games that I’m watching West Virginia and he keeps me guessing,” Drenning said. “If he can keep me guessing and keep the guys on his staff guessing, he can certainly keep the guy on the other side of the field guessing.
“He’s incredibly conscious of tendencies including our own to the point of … I’m not sure how the current practices are but one of the regular things he always did was periodically do a self-scout. The offensive staff would sit down and break down the offensive film to see if we had any tendencies and if so, by design let’s go out and break them.”
There is no question Rich Rodriguez has earned every one of his 100 victories. The next 100? Those will probably be a whole lot easier.
