It looks like Rich Rodriguez is headed back to West Virginia.
According to ESPN and other news, the school is working on a deal to recruit Rodriguez. Jacksonville State coach will succeed Neal Brown after Brown was fired at the end of the season.
Rodriguez coached at West Virginia from 2001 to 2007. The Mountaineers were 60-26 during his time at the school and won 32 games over his final three seasons in Morgantown.
That stretch of football was defined by Rodriguez’s spread offense, and teams across college football rushed to copy it. West Virginia scored nearly 40 points per game in 2007 and was in line to win the BCS title with a victory over Pitt in the final week of the most chaotic season in modern college football history. Instead, WVU lost 13-9 at home to the rival Panthers and fell from No. 2 to No. 11.
Rodriguez’s success at West Virginia earned him the head coaching job at Michigan, replacing Lloyd Carr. His time with the Wolverines was not so good. Michigan went 15-22 in Rodriguez’s three seasons at the school and was fired after a 7-6 season in 2010. Before going 3-9 in Rodriguez’s first season in 2008, Michigan had not missed a game since 1974 and had the longest active bowling streak in the country.
Rodriguez spent the 2011 season out of practice and headed to Arizona in 2012. The Wildcats won 26 games over their first three seasons and reached the Fiesta Bowl at the end of the 2014 season. But after that, the Wildcats never won more than seven games in a season. Rodriguez was fired at the end of the 2017 season following a school investigation after his former administrative assistant filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed in 2019.
After three years as an assistant at three different schools, Rodriguez became the head coach at Jacksonville State in 2022 as the Gamecocks moved to college football’s highest level in 2023. The Gamecocks have gone 9-4 in each of the last two seasons and won Friday’s Conference USA championship game over Western Kentucky.
The Mountaineers, meanwhile, are desperate to get back to the sustained success the school enjoyed in 2000. Bill Stewart went 9-4 for three straight seasons after replacing Rodriguez, and Dana Holgorsen went 10-3 in her first season in 2011. Since then WVU has won 10 games just once (2016) and is 37-35 in Brown’s six seasons.