MORGANTOWN – Four-star safety went on CBS Sports’ National Signing Day livestream, and below him on the ribbon were five schools his commitment decision came down to: Notre Dame, Penn State, Virginia Tech, Pitt and Indiana. But, beneath his grey zip-up was something different.

Sieg unzipped his hoodie, and beneath was a West Virginia flying WV, making his flip from Penn State to WVU official. From out of nowhere, Rich Rodriguez scored the fifth-best player in Pennsylvania.

“It’s been a crazy couple of months,” Sieg said. “I thought I was going to be at Penn State with Coach [James] Franklin. I was excited for that, but everything happens for a reason, and I’m happy with where I’m going.”

Just three hours earlier, the Mountaineers officially signed 4-star offensive lineman Kevin Brown, who was the second-best player in PA, completing his flip from Penn State to WVU. He made his commitment a few weeks prior on “The Pat McAfee Show,” setting a couch on fire in the process.

WVU flipped two of the best players in PA in the span of two weeks, taking them from big schools like Pitt, Virginia Tech, Notre Dame and Ohio State. How?

There’s a saying that if you give someone an inch, they take it a mile, and that’s the approach Rodriguez and his staff took when landing Brown and Sieg.

“We weren’t sure we were in it, and we tried to be,” Rodriguez said on Sieg’s recruiting process. “Then there’s a little bit of a crack in there, again, what happened up there. We got a chance to stay in it.”

Rodriguez talked about the same little crack when recruiting Brown, too. The door opened after Penn State fired James Franklin after six games in the regular season. With the uncertainty of who the Nittany Lions’ new head coach would be, recruits began to look elsewhere. It became a feeding frenzy for the surrounding schools.

Some of the recruits followed Franklin to Virginia Tech, others to the SEC, but two landed on WVU’s roster because of connections and proximity to the players. But it also came with a consistent push from Rodriguez’s staff.

Brown was a bit easier to persuade than Sieg. Brown’s father, Tim, played for Rodriguez in the early years of his first tenure with the Mountaineers. Even after Brown was committed to Penn State, Rodriguez continued to invite Brown to camps and made the most of every opportunity.

“We got to get him somehow, because you saw him in camp, and he was everything you thought he would be,” Rodriguez said. “I’m like, at least he came here. Let’s just keep plugging away, plugging away, plugging away. When they had their change up there, it gave a little bit of a crack to do that. Then we got him and his whole family came down. It was a great visit. Not a good visit, a great visit. And it was good to see his dad and his family.”

Brown was everything you’d want in a football player. He loved football above all else, making him a highly sought-after recruit. Brown had offers from multiple Division I schools, and it came down to WVU, Ohio State and North Carolina.

“Worked hard at it,” Rodriguez said. “My coaches, Travis [Trickett], did a great job because he had a connection there as well. That was a key piece, because, not because of rankings or whatever, it’s just because this guy is a really, really good football player, and he has the mentality that you want your players to have. It’s all about ball. He wasn’t worried about all the fluff stuff. You can like all that other stuff and still be a really good player, but he wasn’t about all the drama, and that was why he was a priority from Day 1. After we saw him in person and knew we had a shot, it became like Travis, and I say, we gotta do what we can.”

Sieg was another coveted player by schools in the surrounding area, and WVU wasn’t in the conversation. Rodriguez and his staff didn’t stop trying. The Mountaineers made a late push to try and land the talented player.

“He’s 45 minutes up the road in Fort Cherry, so we made a hard, late run at it, in the last 24-48 hours,” Rodriguez said. “Our staff did a good job with it, Coach Alley and the guys.”

WVU landed two of the top 5 players in Pennsylvania. After landing Sieg, Alley tweeted out, “The best in PA, go to WV.”

It wasn’t easy. During the bye week, the staff recruited heavy. In the days after the final game against Texas Tech, WVU did even more. Rodriguez said they were on the phones until 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. recruiting the morning of National Signing Day.

Rodriguez and his staff aren’t done. There are still more days to sign players, and then there’s another period in February, and the transfer portal in January. Still work to do.

“We’re not done recruiting, and not just a couple guys that may be today, but there are two or three more that we could have,” Rodriguez said. “You have a February signing period, and you got the transfer portal as well. There’s a little bit of an exhale, like OK, we got 40-something here, but we have 25 more spots. Can you imagine that? Back in the day, you just signed 20 to 25. Today, it’s a little different dynamic, but I enjoy it.”