MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - When Michael Nysewander was young and rooting for Alabama, right before he went to bed each night, he would say his Hail Marys and then conclude with a little prayer for his Crimson Tide.

When he turned 11, at the conclusion of Mike Shula's unsuccessful four-year coaching tenure there, he started praying for West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez to become Alabama's next football coach.

Years later, after playing on three Alabama national championship teams for coach Nick Saban, he figured it might be useful to re-tell that story for a job he was seeking on Rodriguez's Jacksonville State coaching staff.

"We went through the interview and all that stuff and Dusty Rutledge, Rich's chief of staff, was on the call and as we were wrapping up the interview Dusty asked, 'Do you know anything about coach other than this job?'

"Me growing up in Alabama, I remembered I would go to bed and say my Hail Marys and then I'd pray for Rich Rodriguez to be the head coach at Alabama," West Virginia's tight ends coach recalled last Saturday afternoon. "I told them that during the interview and (Rodriguez) started laughing and said, 'Yeah, I turned it down and the guy who took it now has statues outside the stadium.'

"Growing up in a football-rich part of the country, I've always followed coach Rodriguez," Nysewander added.

About 12 miles separate two Marion County football coaching hotbeds - Monongah, where Saban grew up, and Grant Town, where Rodriguez grew up. In the pecking order of things, you can probably consider Grant Town a suburb of Monongah, which is probably a suburb of Fairmont.

And about 20 miles down Interstate 79 is Clarksburg, West Virginia, where Jimbo Fisher grew up.

That 30-mile arc from Grant Town to Monongah to Clarksburg links up three of the better coaches in college football history. 

Saban won seven national championships, six at Alabama, during his 28 seasons coaching college football. Fisher got one title while he was at Florida State and Rodriguez was one bad December night away from getting one during his first tenure at West Virginia in 2007.

Nysewander probably doesn't know Fisher like he knows Saban and Rodriguez, and Jimbo wasn't brought up at all last Saturday, but Nysewander figures there has got to be something in the water these guys were drinking in Marion and Harrison counties.

"(Saban) and coach Rodriguez are very similar, in my opinion," he said. "I think it's the blue-collar, West Virginia-type feel. When we had our exit meetings and we'd get to have one-on-one meetings with coach Saban, I'll never forget, the first time I walked in for my exit meeting and I was a walk-on freshman, all nervous, and (Saban) had his shoes propped up on the desk and all I could do was focus on his shoes because they were so nice. He was telling me about how his dad worked a blue-collar job and was from a mining town. He always had that chip-on-his-shoulder type feel that coach Rodriguez has, too.

"They are very, very similar as far as how they run their programs," Nysewander added.

Both are demanding. Very demanding.

Saban ran the Alabama program with an iron fist from 2007 until his retirement following the 2023 season. Saban won at least 10 games every year from 2008 on, including undefeated campaigns in 2009 and 2014.

His Alabama tenure will go down as one of the most dominant in college football history.

Rodriguez's three-year run at WVU from 2005-07, when he won 32 of 37 games, was among the most dominant in WVU history. Only Clarence Spears, in the mid-1920s, experienced similar success.

Now, Rodriguez is back here again 18 years later trying to reintroduce the same championship mindset to the Mountaineer program. 

"This word is used a ton, and sometimes overused in college football, and I think people don't really know what they're saying, they just say the word, but the culture part of it," Nysewander explained. "Coach Rodriguez and coach Saban are so similar in that sense. I've never seen better culture builders. It's the stuff that doesn't involve really the Xs and Os of football."

He continued.

"Coach Rod talks about the hard-edge mentality all the time, working through adversity and things of that nature where you are kind of building men up to be men," he explained. "To me, in college that's the best opportunity to do it. You are going from boy to man a lot of times and having a leader like coach Saban or coach Rodriguez that just drill in that hard-edge and how to handle adversity, that's what builds teams in my opinion."

Rodriguez and Saban also share a similar disdain for watching teams make dumb mistakes. Their lack of patience for the things that can turn a program sideways, or upside down, is legendary.

"I think it's just the way that they are wired," Nysewander noted. "It's been really cool to work for coach Rod because a lot of people would shy away from that and think that it's intimidating, but he's so attention-to-detail (oriented) on every single play and he may go off on something this second, but then he forgets about it because he's got something else to coach on the next play.

"There is always something to learn and something you can take," he said.

Longtime Rodriguez practice watchers have come to expect certain parts to remain suspended in time until Coach Rod is satisfied that his guys are doing things the way he wants it done.

He simply won't move on to the next thing until that happens.

"You've got to coach the same thing again and again but there is no, 'Oh, maybe he will get it next time' or 'oh, he messed up this time, but he might get it next time.' No, if there is something that's messed up, he's coaching and teaching it right now and that's been really good for me to learn from because there is no gray area," Nysewander explained.

Indeed, there are no gray areas with Rich Rodriguez and Nick Saban. There is a reason why these guys win a lot more than they lose, and it's not just because they grew up drinking the same Marion County water.

West Virginia resumes spring work on Tuesday morning and Rodriguez and senior offensive assistant coach Travis Trickett will be available afterward.