West Virginia is spending this season trying to do more than win games. Rich Rodriguez and his staff are also trying to keep the roster intact long enough to build something in Morgantown, and that means turning as many players as possible from short-term rentals into long-term Mountaineers.
Rodriguez said the program already has more than 25 players on multi-year deals, with more expected to follow as the season moves along. He also made clear that the work never really stops once the roster is assembled. For him and general manager Chuck Lillie, the job is constant retention as much as it is recruitment.
The portal isn’t set to reopen until after the season, but the larger backdrop is the new eligibility setup that changes how transfers work. Under those rules, players get one free transfer without penalty.
After that, a second move comes with a year-long sit-out, and that year cannot be recovered. Rodriguez said that kind of structure should slow the constant movement a little.
“Can you imagine if you’re an NFL franchise and every one of your 53-man roster guys was in the last year of their contract and they become a free agent? I can imagine the stress that the organization, the general managers, and the ownership would be under- like, we got to sign the whole team back. That’s never happened," Rich Rodriguez said.
He used that comparison to explain how he views the college game now. In his eyes, the priority is identifying the right players and then keeping them in place for as much of their college careers as possible.
"In college, basically, we have that scenario in a lot of places. I always say we’ve got to get the right guys, and if we picked the right guy, he picked the right place, we want him to have his whole college career here.
Can we lock him down for the next year or two and have a two-year deal or three-year deal? But you’ve got to have some funds to do that.
You can’t promise something that you’re not going to have. We’re slowly building toward that, which I’m very grateful for.
We’ve kind of got a plan to try before the portal comes open that we’ll have the guys locked down, staying Mountaineers, hopefully throughout their entire college career.”
That effort falls to Lillie and the staff around him, who are working through the financial side of the roster all season long. Rodriguez said there’s no offseason for that part of the operation. The goal is to reduce the number of players still on one-year arrangements before January, when the portal opens again.
Rodriguez said the number of players on multi-year deals could be “more than 25-30,” and he expects that total to rise. The idea, he said, is to make staying at West Virginia attractive even if the money isn’t always the highest number on the table.
“We want it to be where if it’s somewhere close, they’re not going to leave our program. Even if we’re a little bit less paying them, if they like playing here at West Virginia, they like the program, they like what they’re doing, they like the school, want to get a degree from here, all that kind of stuff should play a factor to it. Inevitably, money is going to play a big factor, maybe the biggest, but we want to have the other stuff make them want to stay.”
Rodriguez didn’t identify which players are already locked into those deals, and that’s not likely to change. If those contracts aren’t being made public by anyone else, West Virginia certainly isn’t going to be the one to put them out there.
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