MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Rich Rodriguez could be seen getting a little emotional while singing "Take Me Home, Country Roads" with his players following last Saturday's Gold-Blue Spring Showcase.

It's been nearly 18 years since the last time he sung it with his guys after West Virginia's 66-21 victory over 20^th-ranked Connecticut on Saturday, Nov. 24, 2007.

Obviously, a lot has happened since then.

"I told the players afterward, this whole thing is personal to me," he said. "I played here and coached here a couple times, and I think our guys understand that.

"You know when that started, right?"

It began in 2002, and the guy who was getting a little emotional is the person responsible for starting it.

It all came about sometime before that season when Rodriguez was looking for ways to get the students and fans more involved in his young program. At the time, his team was coming off a disappointing 3-8 rookie campaign and interest in the Mountaineers was on a steady decline.

This downward trend in enthusiasm really began in 1999 when WVU lost seven of 11 games in coach Don Nehlen's next to last season. Attendance at home games was consistently in the 40,000s, and continued that way in 2001 when Rodriguez's squad hit a rough stretch in the middle of the year, losing four in a row to Maryland, Virginia Tech, Miami and Notre Dame.

The team's final two games at Milan Puskar Stadium that year saw 37,120 show up for a home loss to Temple and 44,407 witness another defeat in the Backyard Brawl.

So, all ideas were on the table, including John Denver's 1971 hit song, which had sort of become the state's anthem through the years. The idea was to have the team get together after home football victories and sing it along with the crowd.

A photo taken after West Virginia's 56-7 season-opening home win over Tennessee-Chattanooga on Saturday, Aug. 31, shows the team's first disorganized attempt, players milling about on the field, some raising their helmets and singing along, others walking aimlessly about.

But as West Virginia began to win more games that season, including a late stretch that featured notable victories over Boston College, Virginia Tech and Pitt, the postgame tradition began to take hold.

In the coming years, as it eventually evolved into the form we know today with players arm-in-arm, singing and swaying in unison, the tradition soon bled over into other Mountaineer sports. 

And getting traditions to cross over is actually much more difficult than you might think!

When Nehlen introduced the Flying WV logo in 1980, which was officially adopted by the University in the early 1980s, other WVU teams were slow to follow.

Mountaineer basketball went the entire decade and well into the 1990s before the Flying WV started showing up on their uniforms, sometime around the mid-1990s. Baseball opted to stick with its New York Yankees-style WV logo until Randy Mazey's arrival in 2013.

As for "Country Roads," once Rodriguez's Mountaineer program took off in the mid-2000s, so, too, did the song's usage at WVU sporting events.

"You don't have to be from here, but people who live here and work here in this state, it's kind of our (calling)," Rodriguez explained. "It's like the song has grown in popularity."

Eventually, drunk soccer fans throughout Europe were singing it at matches, and it was popping up in beer gardens all over the continent. 

Bill Danoff, the song's co-author with Taffy Nivert, recalled once being in Yugoslavia on his second honeymoon when he passed an outdoor place where the house band there was playing his song! Only the bass player could speak English, and they only knew one verse and the chorus, but it resonated with Danoff just how popular it had become worldwide.

More recently, many pro sports arenas typically play it as a singalong toward the end of games. 

It's also a standard at piano bars.

"I don't remember how it caught on, but it caught on at some point," Rodriguez pointed out. "It's now one of the greatest traditions in college sports, college football anyway."

The song's popularity reached new heights with a recent Rocket Mortgage commercial titled "Own the Dream" that first aired during the Super Bowl.



Today, any list of the greatest college football traditions invariably includes the singing of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" – a tradition that is but just 23 years old. 

To put that into perspective, you can't even rent a car until you are 25!

"It's iconic. It's kind of neat, and we only play it after a win, right? When you hear that song, it's good memories. (There is) nothing better than a winning locker room and nothing better than (being on) a winning field playing Country Roads," Rodriguez concluded.

Indeed, there is nothing better.