West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez is set to embark on his first season during his second stint at WVU this fall.
Rodriguez came back to his alma mater, as well as where he used to be the head coach, for one reason — his ability to win a national championship.
Rodriguez sat down with Josh Pate of CBSSports and explained his reasoning for coming back to be the coach of the Mountaineers. The main reason, though, was that he believes he can win here at WVU.
"I wouldn't have come back if I didn't think we could win a National Championship. I had a great situation at Jax State. I could've stayed there and finished my career, but I wanted to come back," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez went 60-26 in seven seasons at WVU in the early 2000s and had the Mountaineers on the verge of making the national title game during the 2007 season.
"It's home, people that I care about, the school that I love, and you can win it all here. There's always going to be challenges, but we have a lot of support... and when you do well here, it's so neat to see everybody in the state come together, and that's kind of our goal," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez is looking to make West Virginia nationally relevant again, as they have not been ranked in the AP Top 25 since the end of the 2018 season.
"Looking back, it was kind of magical, but the formula was still the same that we believe today. Find really good players that play really hard and care more about the team success than the individual success, even though the individual success was coming. And that's what we had. It was something the whole state embraced," Rodriguez said of his prior success at WVU.
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