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West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez waves before speaking during the Big 12 NCAA college football media day in Frisco, Texas, Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo\/LM Otero)<\/p>\n
Before the start of a football season, the word expectations is thrown around a lot. The expectations for a team vary from school to school, but every coach and player will say first, it\u2019s winning the conference and then getting a bid for the College Football Playoff, and ultimately to win the National Championship. <\/p>\n
For West Virginia, the expectations depend on who you ask. <\/p>\n
If you just look at the sportsbooks, the expectations for WVU aren\u2019t very high. DraftKings has WVU\u2019s win total set at 5.5 with the under favored, and FanDuel has the same, which is actually up from early in the spring. WVU has the fourth-worst odds to win the Big 12 at +4,000 in DraftKings, and the third-worst on FanDuel at +4,300. UCF, Oklahoma State and Arizona are the only teams with worse odds.<\/p>\n
Then, there\u2019s what the beat writers and other college football writers think of the team. Most don\u2019t think too highly. The Big 12 got rid of the preseason poll, but most polls have the Mountaineers picked anywhere from last to a high of third-to-last in the conference. In the Dominion Post\u2019s poll, WVU is predicted to finish 14th. <\/p>\n
However, the sentiment is a lot different if you read the emails responding to the Dominion Post\u2019s rankings, ride in an Uber from the stadium, or sit at a Morgantown bar for a couple of minutes. Everyone around Morgantown sees Rich Rodriguez as the savior and will put the Mountaineers right back on the map.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think that any Rich Rodriguez team is going to finish 14th in any league, then you don\u2019t know squat about college football,\u201d a reader said.<\/p>\n
Those expectations put a lot of pressure on Rodriguez to perform in the first year. If you look at his first season back in 2001, he didn\u2019t have immediate success. Rodriguez finished 3-8 in his first season with the Mountaineers. <\/p>\n
The 2025 team is a lot different than that squad, too. Rodriguez has a transfer portal-built team, with 70-plus new faces, with just last year\u2019s film under different schemes to go off of. There are some Jacksonville State players from the team he coached last year, but that\u2019s a minority compared to the rest of the 115 players. <\/p>\n
Since Brad Lewis was back in 2001 from the 2000 season, Rodriguez had a strong idea of his quarterback in his first year at WVU. Rodriguez\u2019s starting quarterback is completely up in the air for 2025. He hasn\u2019t narrowed anything down from multiple options. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot of unknown for his 2025 squad, which makes the expectations all over the place. <\/p>\n
Most of the talk of expectations from outside noise can affect a team in different ways. Some coaches and players listen to it, and others don\u2019t. West Virginian and college football legend Nick Saban famously called the outside noise \u201crat poison,\u201d whether it was good or bad. <\/p>\n
Even though it might not seem like he would, Rodriguez does listen to the outside noise and agrees with the Morgantown natives.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re picked last or next to last, like we\u2019ve been picked last or next to last in the Big 12, you might mention and say, I think we\u2019re gonna be a little better than that,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u201cMaybe try to use it as some motivation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Expectations are a good conversation starter in the offseason, and it might be fun to create educated projections of what might happen, but realistically, everyone\u2019s just guessing and nobody knows for sure.<\/p>\n
Rodriguez thinks the same, and in the heat of the moment, what people think of his team won\u2019t matter during the game. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think when the stuff hits the fan, and you\u2019re in the middle of a tight game in the third quarter, and you\u2019re going at each other, I don\u2019t think that at that time, you worry about where you\u2019re picked in the poll,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to default to your level of training, no matter where you\u2019re picked or no matter what people think of you. Our level of training has to go up, because that\u2019s where you\u2019re going to bench the default to.\u201d<\/p>\n
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