Jul 12, 2025
West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez takes questions at the podium during a press conference. (Photo by Greg Hunter/Blue & Gold News)
MORGANTOWN — If one word can be taken out of the Big 12’s recently completed football media days that projects the image the league wants to project for this upcoming football season, that word would be “parity.”
There are some who might want to argue that “parody” might be more precise, for when someone objectively looked at the league’s place in the Power 4 structure of modern college football, it might be down a couple of runs from the SEC and Big Ten, but the commissioner, Brett Yormark, left no doubt that parity is what they are selling this season.
“Once again, I believe the Big 12 will be the deepest football conference in America,” Yormark said in his introductory remarks. “No league offers the competitive balance that we do. Last season, the Big 12 led the nation in fourth quarter lead changes and go-ahead scores in the final minute of conference games.”
The way things have worked out in the changing world of college football, no one has replaced Oklahoma and Texas as power brokers in the Big 12, leaving 16 schools who are similar enough that they create a balance that leaves them shy of national championship contenders but who are capable of creating a balanced race to the finish.
True, one team will finish as the champion, one will be at the bottom, but this aura of any team being able to win on any given day in any given time zone sets up a situation where no one knows what will happen and that is something West Virginia can grab ahold of as it moves forward into the new year.
Things are so discombobulated that the conference opted to do away with the coaches’ preseason poll, still shuddering in the shadow that the team selected to finish last in 2024 — Arizona State — won the league and the projected top-5 teams finished far down in the standings.
Rather than project that on the teams in the league, they just say the heck with it … let’s just play the season and let the chips fall where they may.
That makes it far less ludicrous for any of the schools to present an optimistic view of their upcoming season and Rich Rodriguez has enthusiastically put on that happy face even though publications that did do preseason projection polls placed WVU in the bottom three of the league as he returns after a 17-year absence.
This is because the team is a complete question mark, not only to the publications doing the predicting and to the public, but even to the coach.
Rodriguez freely admits he doesn’t really know what he has, but can tilt that to the point that it might be better than expected and that his team is setting winning the conference title as a goal rather than an impossibility.
Speaking on FOX during the media day interview sessions, Rodriguez put it this way:
“Our goal is to win the league every year. People worry about what you think about the playoffs and I could give less of a c–p about the playoffs,” he said. “If you win the league, you’re in. That’s our goal every year.”
Note he isn’t saying they WILL win the league, only that it’s a goal and in the combative and competitive Big 12 that becomes a possibility, as Arizona State proved last season.
He understands the situation.
“What do we have to do to win it?” he asks. “Now, I have unknowns. I mean, it’s not coach speak. I have 72 new players. Three-fourths of my team are new and half of those weren’t here for the spring, so I think I know what I have but until we go through August camp I won’t know for sure.”
His players come from all over. They are freshmen and they are transfers. Some played in major conferences, more played at a lower level.
But that is not necessarily a negative. We live in an age where so many players need only to get the chance at the top level to blossom and Rodriguez has always been someone who would give them that kind of opportunity.
He fits players into a system in which he believes and brings them in as much for their intangibles as for their talents.
Think Owen Schmitt and you will get the point.
“We’ve got the talent,” Rodriguez said on FOX. “We’ve got enough good players that if we play really well and we have some fortune, we can win it. I think we can win it all at West Virginia. It’s going to take a lot of work. We’re maybe not going to be ready right away, but things are in place to do that.”
Rodriguez does not expect to suffer through a three-win season as he did in his first term at WVU when he replaced the legendary Don Nehlen.
If Arizona State could do it last year, their first season in the Big 12, Rodriguez reasons, why not West Virginia?
Or, put another way, is it parity or parody to think so boldly?
Copyright © 2025 Parkersburg Newspapers, Inc. | https://www.newsandsentinel.com | 519 Juliana St., Parkersburg, WV 26101 | 304-485-1891
