MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – One of the exciting things about having a new football coach with lots of new players is wondering what new things we will see this season.

In the case of West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez, there are probably some clues based on his recent history. If you look at what his last two Jacksonville State teams did offensively, the Gamecocks ran the ball, ran it some more, and then when they got tired of running it, they continued to do so anyway.

It was a similar deal during some of his most successful seasons at West Virginia with athletic quarterbacks Rasheed Marshall and Pat White and continuing at Michigan with Denard Robinson.

But there were times, too, when Rodriguez threw it more than he ran it.

That was certainly the case during his Division II days at Glenville State. Sitting near Jed Drenning in the radio booth for all these years, I've heard that a time or two. Rodriguez also threw it quite a bit during his most successful season at Arizona in 2014 when the Wildcats won the Pac-12 South and played in the Fiesta Bowl.

Therefore, if you are a fan, or one of the coaches at Robert Morris, Ohio or Pitt wondering what Rodriguez's Mountaineers are planning to do at the start of the season on both sides of the ball, well, good luck!

Last year's West Virginia tape is worthless because it's almost an entirely new team.

Last year's Jacksonville State tape can be of some use from the standpoint that the Gamecocks ran it more than 600 times and a handful of those offensive players came with Rodriguez to West Virginia, although not the two primary ball carriers.

You can study Oklahoma's tape to get an idea what the Sooners did with Zac Alley coordinating the defense, although defensive-oriented head coach Brent Venables likely had a big hand in the game planning, not to mention Alley is coaching a different set of players here at West Virginia this fall.

What you can bank on is that Rodriguez is going to do what his players do best, tendencies be damned! 

That's why he's been so successful for such a long period of time.

"What I've learned over the years is 'let's get really good at something and then build off that.' People will say, 'Oh, they have a tendency to do this.' Well, if you don't have any tendencies then you probably aren't any good at anything," he said earlier today.

That makes a lot of sense coming from a guy who has been involved in 321 college football games as a head coach, another 60 or so as an offensive coordinator and countless others as a player and an assistant coach, not to mention the thousands of practices he's run through the years.

Someone today asked Rodriguez if he charts plays and keeps stats of specific things happening in practices. He does, but he's also got a good set of eyes that sees nearly everything in real time, and then everything afterward.

He doesn't need to look at a chart to know which guys can make a contested catch in traffic, which ones can't, or which players are fast enough to turn the corner and which ones are not.

That goes for every position on the football field.

"Oh yeah, we chart them, but I don't really need them," he said. "Hell, I don't have the greatest memory, but I can see that play ain't worth a flip! Every time we call it, someone screws it up. 'Okay, take that one out. Next!' At least that's what they say at the barber shop, right?

"There are some things, 'Gosh, I'd like to run this play, but I don't think we can hold up that long.' It's the same way, protection-wise, or what have you," he explained. "A fast quarterback or an athletic guy can cover up a mistake, whether it's the O-line's mistake or his mistake. Maybe he makes the wrong read, but he's fast enough to outrun the wrong read.

"That's always going to be the case first," he continued. "The biggest thing with the offensive line, and coaches have a tendency of doing this, is they've got to put this play in as an answer to this and if they are doing this then we've got to do that. That all makes sense, but if you can't execute it, or you can't get good at something, then you are always going to struggle."

So, you stick to the stuff you do well before attempting to move on to something else. 

This goes all the way back to the Walter Camp days in the late 1880s, at least for the really good coaches. The not-so-good ones might be tempted to keep searching for different ideas, or better, more innovative answers, rather than identifying first what your guys do well and then doing it over and over and over again before doing something else.

"I'd rather run 10 plays really, really well than run about 40 plays half-assed," the coach pointed out.

While Rodriguez concedes all of his quarterbacks on the roster this year can run well enough to run the football, this might be the best set of quarterbacks he's ever had throwing the ball as a collective group.
He admits there is no route package or pass play off the table at this point in training camp.

"If we are looking at strengths at what we have personnel-wise, and not just because we are new and kind of younger up front, and I don't mind saying this, but we are putting a lot more pass plays in than run plays," he observed. "I'm still figuring out, 'Okay, what are our strengths here?' That's certainly a thought for us going into the next two weeks, when we pare this thing down. I'm not worried about 50% run plays, I'm worried about is these are the plays that we can execute."

What West Virginia ultimately ends up doing really well remains to be seen, on both sides of the ball. That should be intriguing and exciting for fans coming out for the first time to see the team play against Robert Morris on Saturday, Aug. 30, and it will also be a mystery for the Colonial coaches trying to prepare for it. 

The same really goes for Ohio the following Saturday and on down the line with Pitt and Kansas in the coming weeks.

"You can look at our defense and study Zac and you can look at our offense and study what we've done, you might get some tendencies here and there, but we are just a completely different team with different strengths and weaknesses, and we're still figuring it out," he explained.

"That's not being coy for our opponents. What are we going to be good at? What are our guys good at? Even the stubborn coaches who say 'this is what we run' you still have to gear it toward what your guys do best. Not just the quarterbacks, but all your guys. We're expansive enough as an offense to say we can do a lot of different things, but what we feature and get really good at, we might not figure that out until the season gets started," he said.

Indeed, Rodriguez's immediate past has consisted of lots of runs, but there have been plenty of times throughout his coaching history when he's also thrown it a lot.

He did leave us with this little nugget on Monday afternoon.

"There is not really a pass play or a route package where we're like, 'Well, we can't do that because we don't have the arm strength to make that throw,'" Rodriguez said.

"That's kind of a neat deal to have every quarterback make every throw for every route. Now we've got to see which ones we can be the most accurate with. That's kind of a fun thing to have," he concluded.

West Virginia spent Monday morning up on the Steve Antoline Family Practice Field in shells. Rodriguez indicated the plan for this week is for fully padded practices on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Bandits coach Jeff Casteel and tight ends coach Michael Nysewander also visited with media earlier today.