Closing the Door on 2024 and Looking Ahead to 2025 and Beyond – West Virginia University Athletics

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – And so, West Virginia’s 2024 football season ends in a soccer stadium in front of about 12,000 fans in Frisco, Texas, on a Tuesday night in mid-December.
 
It was not how people here envisioned things going back in August when some were making the Mountaineers their sleeper picks to win a wide-open Big 12 Conference.
 
West Virginia was coming off a nine-win season and a Duke’s Mayo Bowl victory over North Carolina with several key players returning, including quarterback Garrett Greene and All-Big 12 offensive lineman Wyatt Milum.
 
Several thousand hopeful West Virginia University students showed up at the Life Sciences Building on WVU’s downtown campus for a live broadcast of “The Pat McAfee Show” a day before the Mountaineers’ season-opening game against eighth-ranked Penn State at Milan Puskar Stadium.
 
That game turned sour soon after West Virginia had battled back from a two-touchdown deficit to make it a one-score game right before the end of the first half. But the defense couldn’t defend the final 32 seconds, giving up a long pass and then another for a touchdown to give the Nittany Lions a commanding 20-6 lead. 
 
A two-hour, 19-minute lightning delay ensued, sending most of the 62,084 in attendance to their cars. Many never came back – and continued to stay away for the remainder of the season. 
 
To old-timers, the sight of empty seats at West Virginia’s final home game against UCF was reminiscent of the difficult times the program endured at the end of the tenures of Art Lewis in 1959 and Gene Corum in 1965.
 
A lot of the issues that showed up in the Penn State loss plagued West Virginia all season long – primarily missed opportunities on offense and a defense that was habitually susceptible to giving up big plays.
 
There were four plays of 40 yards or longer, including a 50-yard touchdown pass and a 40-yard touchdown run, in the Penn State defeat.
 
The Athletics Communications Office has a listing of 20-yard plays in its game notes and the opponents’ side nearly spans an entire column of the page. There were three more plays of 46 yards or longer in last night’s 42-37 loss to Memphis, including a back-breaking 89-yard pass to the WVU 1 right after West Virginia had battled back from a 17-0 second-quarter deficit to trail 35-30 with 10:49 left in the game.
 
The defensive issues West Virginia had at the beginning of the season were never fixed, which ultimately necessitated a rare, mid-season coordinator change.
 
The 2012 Mountaineer defense that gave up 38.1 points and 472.5 yards per game ranks as the worst in school history, but its poor performance was somewhat masked by the playmaking abilities of quarterback Geno Smith and wide receivers Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey.
 
That 2012 group allowed 63 points in a win against Baylor, 45 in a win against Texas, 49 in a loss at Texas Tech, 55 in a loss to Kansas State, 39 in a loss to TCU, 55 in a loss at Oklahoma State, 50 in a loss to Oklahoma and 38 in a miserable bowl loss to Syracuse.
 
This year’s defense allowed 45, 49, 52 and 42 points in four of its final seven games. There was the late two-score implosion at Pitt, which sent WVU fans home scratching their heads, and the near-implosion at Arizona that led to Jeff Koonz assuming the interim defensive coordinator role.
 
The final figures this year were 31.9 points and 415.2 yards per game for West Virginia’s opponents, which made it challenging for the offense to keep up.
 
Despite its difficulties, WVU rallied for a 5-4 record with regular season games remaining against Baylor, UCF and Texas Tech.
 
But Baylor scored on five of its six first-half possessions – four of those coming on explosive plays of 22, 43, 40 and 51 yards – pitched a shutout in the third quarter and outscored the Mountaineers 14-7 in the fourth period to register its first-ever victory in Morgantown.
 
Two weeks later, Texas Tech thoroughly dominated WVU in every phase in a difficult-to-watch, 52-15 loss that ultimately cost Neal Brown his job.
 
The season ended two-and-a-half weeks later against Memphis with Chad Scott coaching the team on an interim basis.
 
Now, the program transitions to native son Rich Rodriguez, whose prior Mountaineer teams produced those great seasons in 2005, 2006 and 2007 before he left for Michigan. It was Rodriguez who raised the expectations of WVU football fans and the national profile of the program.
 
And he’s back to do it again.
 
He was in Texas last night to watch the game in person. He was there to see how the players reacted to each other and the adversity they faced. Some of them will return; others won’t.
 
That’s college football today in the NIL era.
 
For those who return, an entirely different experience will be in store for them when spring practice commences in a couple of months.
 
“Kids have to be coached hard, and I think sometimes coaches today are afraid to coach guys,” Rodriguez told Tony Caridi during a special United Bank Playbook taping last week. “They are afraid they will get upset. I think great players want to be coached and they are going to get coached here.”
 
Winning is not easy, and there are no shortcuts to success. Rodriguez took the long road to get back to Morgantown, most recently coaching at Jacksonville State, where his Gamecocks won 27 of their 37 games during his three seasons there.
 
“It seems like yesterday, but at the same time it’s been an interesting journey these last 17 years, and I’m so thrilled to be back,” Rodriguez said.
 
There was a five-year gap between his six-year stint at Arizona that ended in 2017 and his Jacksonville State tenure, so Rodriguez has paid his dues returning to power conference football.
 
West Virginia football fans have certainly paid their dues, too, since Rodriguez’s departure 17 years ago. They have witnessed seven-loss seasons four times now since 2019, including this year, and they are desiring something different.
 
Rodriguez delivered before, and Mountaineer fans are hopeful he can deliver again.