West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez didn’t need anybody to sell him on what Jeff Casteel brings to the table as a defensive coach when he hired him to oversee the bandits.
Of course, the two worked together on two different stops previously at West Virginia from 2001-07 and then at Arizona from 2012-16. However, prior to that, the pair squared off against each other in the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference when Rodriguez was at Glenville and Casteel at Shepherd.
The two squared off from 1991-96.
“That’s when I first recognized his work,” Rodriguez said.
Meanwhile, Casteel noticed that Rodriguez’s teams had many of the qualities that he valued.
“The thing that Coach does really well when you play his teams, his teams are competitive. And I mean an aggressive, tough, hard-nosed, competitive. You know you’re going to have to work for four quarters to try to beat him,” he said.
During those meetings where Rodriguez was the head coach and Casteel the defensive coordinator it was always a battle between the two.
“I always thought they were very well coached. Always thought they were very physical and probably back in those days that was always the hardest team to go against every year,” Rodriguez said. “So, I had a lot of respect for him going into it.”
Casteel took a leap of faith following his stint as the coordinator at Shepherd from 1991-2000, when he was hired as the defensive ends coach at UTEP in 2000. It was a move that he initially wasn’t going to take due to his children being so young at the time, but his wife convinced him that if he didn’t, he would regret it.
So, while his family stayed behind, Casteel decided to take the job.
Turns out just a year later, Rodriguez had gotten the head coaching job in Morgantown, and he phoned Casteel to offer him the opportunity to follow him back to West Virginia.
“I’m down there a season and Coach Rod calls me and gets this job,” he said.
Casteel initially served as the defensive line coach in his first season and was then promoted to co-defensive coordinator the following year.
“When I hired him here that was the first time we worked together. We were different, we were doing the odd stack back then. It was a little unique too. Not a whole lot of people were doing that so the whole staff was learning it on the run a little bit,” Rodriguez said.
In 2003, Casteel was promoted to the full-time defensive coordinator and the rest is history as he would lead the program to a lot of success under three different head coaches with not only Rodriguez, but Bill Stewart and then Dana Holgorsen placing him in the role.
The Mountaineers experienced one of their greatest periods of success, including winning three BCS bowl games - 2006 Sugar Bowl, 2008 Fiesta Bowl and the 2012 Orange Bowl during that time.
And now, the two are back together on the same side once again.
----------
• Talk about it with West Virginia fans on The Blue Lot.
• SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest on Mountaineer sports and recruiting.
• Get all of our WVU videos on YouTube by subscribing to the WVSports.com Channel
• Follow us on Twitter: @WVSportsDotCom, @rivalskeenan, @wesleyshoe
