West Virginia is only beginning to dip its toes into spring football, but head coach Rich Rodriguez already understands the importance of roster management moving forward.
That’s now a big part of the job as a college football head coach, especially at the power four level, but Rodriguez also was able to gain valuable experience during his three years at Jacksonville State.
While he was with the Gamecocks, Rodriguez helped to transition the program from the FCS level to FBS and in many ways had to build a roster from scratch. The program wasn’t fully funded in their first year and operated with 70-72 players so it taught Rodriguez some valuable lessons on managing a roster.
“Like how do we fit that in? Are we getting walk-ons? What’s the quality of our walk-ons? You know, what spots do we want to make sure we have enough scholarship guys at?” he said.
That took some adjusting like anything new, but through it all, Rodriguez feels confident with even more change on the horizon when it comes to roster sizes at the FBS level, he will be prepared.
Especially with the news that with the approval of the impending House Settlement roster sizes could be trimmed down to 105 as he discussed with others on a Big 12 call this past week.
“And so, our experience doing the 1AA thing and my experience doing Division II even before that, you know, I thought may be able to help us get more of a quality roster from one to 105 than you would think before,” he said.
Not all of your principles have to change in the realms of philosophies or culture, but how teams recruit, how you manage the roster and decisions that coaches make on who they decide to bring in certainly have and will continue to evolve as college football changes.
That means adapting with it.
“The last thing you want, I want to hear my coaches say, this is the way we've always done it, it's hell, if that still applies and works, yeah, but if it doesn't, hell, I like winning too much not to adapt, and so we've got to learn how to adapt, and it's different,” he said.
Even with all the roster movement that’s already occurred with 40+ new players on the roster for spring, there will need to be more in the future in order to round out the current team.
For example, one position that is certainly going to be further addressed is the wide receiver room as the Mountaineers currently are low on numbers at that spot. While some additional options could emerge over the course of the spring, it’s still going to be a spot that the coaching staff is likely to search for outside help once the second transfer portal window opens in mid-April.
But in order to get to where West Virginia wants to be, there are going to have to be in regard to the roster size, the Mountaineers are going to have to make some difficult decisions.
“I don’t like that, probably most coaches don’t. I think it’s going to cut out a lot of opportunities, especially for walk-ons. It seems like a lot of guys but that’s going to be the hardest part is we’re going to have to cut some guys because we have to get down to 105 and then we’re going to have to cut a few more because we’re going to need certain positions that are probably thin right now like wide receivers. We’re going to try to pick up some. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to win games,” he said.
----------
• 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
