When it comes to building rosters, West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez isn’t worried about remaining eligibility or some other factors. Instead, one trait sits at the forefront of it all.
“Just get guys that are good enough to win with,” Rodriguez told The In the Gun Podcast.
While the hope is that West Virginia will be able to pull in players with multiple years left out of the transfer market moving forward, that isn’t going to be a necessity.
The focus is simply on landing the best players possible to fill out a roster and there will be no split between the various types of additions such as transfers, junior college, high school and wherever else.
Now because of the late start this past off-season due to the coaching change, West Virginia had target more portal options because that’s what the staff believed had the best players remaining.
But that likely isn’t going to be the case moving forward.
“Next year, we’ll have more high school guys than portal guys. Probably a lot more,” Rodiguez said.
The veteran head coach believes that recruiting is going very well and bringing in some talented pieces into the program with Rodriguez keeping the message consistent.
“I tell recruits I’m not guaranteeing they’ll start the day they get on campus, but I don’t recruit anybody to be backups. If we’re recruiting guys it’s because we think he has an opportunity to contribute,” he said.
Rodriguez believes that moving forward West Virginia should have a younger roster and will be able to hopefully build it up from there moving forward. The transition forced the program to get older quicker, but the future will be built from the ground up with a consistent focus on culture.
And that means placing a strong emphasis on the team aspect of it all.
“Everything nowadays, more so than ever before, pushes guys to be individual, whether it's social media or whatever the case may be. Everything is pushing them to be more about them and I than us and we. We will still go by the culture. The team is first. We still coach our guys,” Rodriguez said.
The best players still want to be coached and Rodriguez will do exactly that.
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