West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez reacts after a touchdown against Pittsburgh during the first half of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025, in Morgantown, W.Va. (AP Photo/Kathleen Batten)

One of Rich Rodriguez’s favorite things to do after West Virginia’s weekly press conferences, and arguably the whole week other than coaching, is watching high school players film. Whether that’s from commits or players he could recruit.

“Those kids get me a little bit of jump in my step and get excited because I see some of what we got coming in,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez gets even more excited when he sees his coaching staff improving players, because he knows in the back of his mind that it’ll be even better when he gets a fresh recruiting class to mold.

This season hasn’t gone according to plan. The Mountaineers are 2-5 and have lost all four Big 12 games, and weren’t competitive in any of them. There are a lot of problems with this team.

During his weekly press conference, Rodriguez talked about how he plans to fix the team long term, and it starts with recruiting. He plans to bring in 35 high school recruits this season instead of the 70 transfers. Rodriguez will still add a couple of transfers, but the focus will be on high school recruiting.

Last year, Rodriguez and his staff missed out on landing a big recruiting class and had to build the roster full of transfers. This year, it’ll be different, and they plan to go hard on recruiting since the transfer portal is so hard to navigate.

“You used to recruit a guy, and you know him for a year,” defensive coordinator Zac Alley said. “Our 26s, we sign here in six weeks, or whatever it is. I started recruiting them in January. Some of them, before that, before I got here. You get to know their families, who they are, how they handle things. You go to games and practices and see it. In the portal, they land at 8 a.m in the morning. You have about six hours. They leave at 4 p.m. Sometimes, if you’re not the first guy on the conversation, you can’t even get a visit.”

The portal is hard to build a roster from if you’re a school that can’t financially compete with the bigger schools, like Texas Tech and Ohio State. Rodriguez talked on his radio show Monday night about how WVU didn’t have the finances before last season to compete for the top talent in the portal. Instead, Rodriguez had to get players a little below and coach them to be at that level.

So far, Rodriguez hasn’t done that, resulting in the four-straight losses. He also admitted to missing on some transfers. Alley agreed with Rodriguez.

“Anytime you’re losing, that’s something that you got to look at and say, ‘Okay, where did we miss?’ What are some things that we thought this guy was going to be this, and he’s not?” Alley said. “On the flip side, some guys, maybe you weren’t as confident in that they had done better things than you thought they would do.”

It’s a big pill to swallow because Rodriguez and Alley invested time and finances into bringing them to Morgantown, just for them to be non-factors.

“But you know, I think across the board, we’ve had to self-evaluate and say, ‘Hey, I brought everybody here, and I picked everyone on defense that coach Rodriguez went and looked at,'” Alley said. “So you own that as a coach, and I do think there were probably some mistakes we made.”

But, like Alley said, there were some hits, like Nevada transfer corner Michael Coats, and wide receiver Cam Vaughn. It wasn’t all bad.

From a financial standpoint, Rodriguez said WVU is now in a position to compete with the bigger schools in the portal. It won’t be on par, but close enough to make the team competitive with coaching.

The portal won’t be the focus, though; it’ll be more on recruiting high school players and coaching them up to help win more games in the future.

“Obviously, it’s a player’s game,” Rodriguez said. “From a recruiting standpoint, I think we’re fixing the best way to fix our problem, get really good players and coach them up to be really good, that’s what we’re going to do.”