MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – There's a lot happening in Morgantown these days. West Virginia University's two primary revenue sports, football and men's basketball, have new coaches, and downtown in Stewart Hall, Michael Benson is still settling in as WVU's 27^th president.

What is immediately confronting Benson at a 30,000-foot level are the headwinds of a nationwide higher education system experiencing declining public trust, financial instability and the perception in some circles that academic offerings are not meeting societal needs.

Down closer to the ground, Benson's athletics department, overseen by Wren Baker, continues to deal with the fallout of the recent House Settlement and the added financial burden of having to compensate its athletes.

In a comprehensive three-part series posted on WVUsports.com earlier this summer, Baker discussed the need to increase revenue for West Virginia to keep up with the rest of the Big 12.  

Hoppy Kercheval's recent commentary on West Virginia MetroNews' website provided a more condensed analysis of the situation.

At the heart of the matter is the profitability and success of the department's No. 1 revenue generator - Mountaineer football. When football was nationally ranked and winning BCS bowls in the mid-2000s, Milan Puskar Stadium was consistently full, and the athletics department was thriving.

In 2007, during Rich Rodriguez's peak year of success, West Virginia averaged 60,400 fans for its six home football dates that season. Since joining the Big 12 in 2012, however, the best year for attendance was in 2018 when the Mountaineers averaged 58,158 fans per game.

That was also the last time West Virginia was in the Associated Press College Football Top 25 Poll. The program's current seven-year rankings drought is its longest since 1969 when coach Jim Carlen ended WVU's 11-year poll hiatus.

Over the last 56 years, there were two four-year gaps in the polls from 1977-81 and from 1998-2002, and in both instances, coaching changes were required.

When Don Nehlen took over in 1980, in just a year's time he had the Mountaineers pointed upward. Then, when Nehlen realized his program was growing stale and needed some reinvigoration in the late 1990s, he decided to step aside after the 2000 season and let the 37-year-old Rodriguez take over.

Two years later, Rich Rod had West Virginia back in the rankings and toward the end of his first tenure here, the Mountaineers had become a perennial top-10 program.

Now, 24 years later, Rodriguez is back to give WVU football another much-needed jolt of adrenaline. Over the last 17 years, Rodriguez's stops have included Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tucson, Arizona, Oxford, Mississippi, Monroe, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Alabama.

He's won 190 football games at some places where winning isn't always easy to do.

"I've been on this journey just like Forrest Gump," he said earlier this month at Big 12 media days in Frisco, Texas. "I was in the Bayou, out in the desert, in the hills of Alabama and all over the place. I would have stayed at Jax State for the rest of my career and would have been perfectly happy because I loved it there.

"We made great friends, we were winning and having success, but this was an opportunity to go back home and finish my career at a place I played at, coached at (four different times), and all of that is really neat," he added.

Back in 2001, when Rodriguez was first selling his style of play to the fanbase, he talked about "spotting the ball" and his guys playing "with their hair on fire" and "holding the rope." Subsequent years at other places have led him to simplify it to just playing with a "hard edge."

That was the calling card of his most successful West Virginia teams anyway. They didn't always win, but they were going to fight until the final play, and fans usually stuck around even until the bitter end watching it.

There were no halftime traffic jams on Don Nehlen Drive trying to get out of dodge like we've witnessed over the last three or four years. Mountaineer fans loathe losing, for sure, but they despise a lack of toughness and effort even more. To them, watching players jumping up and down on the sidelines before kickoffs doesn't count as enthusiasm.

"You can sit in the stands and maybe not understand the Xs and Os, but you can tell if guys are playing hard," Rodriguez said. "I didn't do a lot of reviewing of last year because last year was last year, but I've talked to our guys about a couple of games I watched and told them, 'We did not play as hard as we can play.' There is never an excuse for that. 

"We didn't do that at times, and that has got to change immediately," he added.

Rodriguez knows that many fans coming to Morgantown for games drive long distances to get here, in some instances as much as six or seven hours, which means they've got a lot longer to ponder some of the poor performances they saw in those double-digit home defeats last season.

There is a responsibility for the players to perform and it's Rodriguez's job to get the most out of them.

"Our fans cry when we win and they cry when we lose; it's emotional," he explained. "It's personal for me. I was that way when I was a player, and I was that way when I coached here. Have I mellowed a little bit? I don't know, but I like winning. 

"Every decision I make is does it help us win? It has nothing to do with anybody's feelings and that's probably a singleness of purpose, which doesn't ring well with some people, but to me, everywhere I've ever been – does it help us win?"

Naturally, the obvious solution is getting better players, but Rodriguez concedes that's going to take some time.

"A large majority of our roster is from somewhere else," he pointed out. "We must make it feel like this is their home, just like they grew up in Morgantown, Grant Town or wherever the case may be. It's got to be that important to them to do that."

The two things Rodriguez and his assistant coaches can address immediately are effort and toughness. That process already began last spring, carried over during the summer and will continue when preseason camp opens next week.

In the meantime, he knows there is still a portion of the fanbase that he's got win over again. When you have unprecedented success and then leave, there is always a desire to want more. Consequently, he's had some awkward conversations during the hiring process last December and in the ensuing months interacting with fans at Mountaineer Athletic Club functions.

"There have been a couple of times when people have said something here and there, and I understand it," he said. "Shoot, it might be better they did have hard feelings because then maybe they did miss you. I don't mind looking back on it if you can learn something from it."

The learning continues, a process that first began in 1988 at Salem College when he was only 24 years old. A year later, he became the nation's youngest unemployed head coach when the school dropped football.

"I probably don't say it enough, but I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity to coach here, and I take it very seriously," he explained. "I've learned a whole lot in a week, let alone the last 17 years. They should be getting a better version of me and my staff, and I hope they will get a better version of our players over the next couple of years, too."

Most fans are buying in.

Season ticket and 304 Mobile Pass sales have surpassed 31,000 for the first time since 2013, soon after the Mountaineers were coming off their Orange Bowl victory over Clemson.

Rodriguez understands the importance football's success means to the overall health and well-being of Mountaineer athletics. It even extends beyond that to the health and well-being of the entire University and the local economy.

Historically, good football seasons typically mean higher enrollments for the school the following year.

"We're a business now," Rodriguez observed. "Going forward, every coach and every athletic director is going to tell you we're running a business, and you don't want to go bankrupt running your business.

"We're in a good position because we're the only deal in the state, so we've got to make good business decisions, hire the right people, hire the right players and make the right decisions. When you make a wrong one, correct it in a hurry and we'll be fine," he said.

Rodriguez says West Virginia University is the only school in the country he can tell recruits the meaning of getting a degree from here.

"I think ours is pretty good," he said. "My degree means something. I had a great experience here. They can't get rid of me now. This is it. I'm finishing where I got started at West Virginia."

And for Rodriguez to finally complete what was left undone here 18 years ago in 2007?

"Win; that's what I've got to do," he concluded.

Preseason practice gets underway on Wednesday, July 30.