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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/hammer_it_out on 2025-03-03 20:12:38+00:00.
Written by Joseph Smith
MORGANTOWN - If there’s one thing West Virginia football head coach Rich Rodriguez hates, it’s a player in his locker room being a bit too soft.
It's a refrain WVU fans and press members have already heard multiple times in Rodriguez’s limited addresses to Mountaineer Nation since his hiring, mostly through press conferences and podcast appearances.
Unfortunately for Rodriguez and the staff he has assembled at WVU, that most dreaded of player traits is an issue he’s still having to root out as the team has officially put the books on the first week of 2025 spring football practices.
“It was pretty wide today,” Rodriguez said at a press conference after Saturday’s practice regarding the gap between his view on what’s soft and his players’ views on what’s soft.
“I told them afterwards -- I think it's there, I see moments where I think it's there. But if you’re soft, if you’re soft mentally and physically, you’re not going to make it. You’ll stand out amongst your teammates, stand out in the program, and it's not going to be the place for you. So it's pretty simple.”
But ‘soft’ can encompass a number of different traits both mentally and physically to different people -- so what exactly does Rodriguez mean when he calls out soft behavior?
Well, he was prompted with such a question by the press on Saturday, and he tried to illustrate in layman's terms exactly what he means when he characterizes a player as soft.
“I’m talking about like, you’re supposed to physically, in football terms, punch a guy and knock him off balance or instead you just lean into him,” Rodriguez said.
“Or instead of driving a guy down the field, you just kind of, like, bear hug him. Instead of going to thud a guy and legally hit head in front and above the waist and you knock him backwards, you just kind of jog and tag him.”
He also acknowledged that some of his current players might not even quite understand yet what he and his staff mean when attacking a player for being too soft, and that he pushes his staff and himself to continue to explain and reiterate what he’s talking about.
“That’s us as coaches, we have to explain what that is. That’s a good point, and I’ll probably need to remind my coaches, they don’t know, they may not know what our version of being soft is. We have to teach them,” Rodriguez said.
But he also gets that it can be a hard thing to adapt to sometimes, and that his mentality might not be for everyone. There are a number of incoming transfers on the roster from Rodriguez’s previous stop at Jacksonville State, and he knows that they might sometimes think he’s “crazy." But he hopes they understand there is a reason he coaches the way he does.
“Those guys would say, man, he may look crazy, and he is probably a little bit crazy, but there is some method to the craziness. Or they might just say, hey, this dude is just nuts,” he said.
But whether he comes across as crazy, an old-school hard-ass, or as a caring and loving leader, Rodriguez isn’t concerned as long as what he’s dishing out to his athletes becomes adopted in the team’s overall mentality and culture.
In fact, in his mind, he and his coaching staff have already begun to fail at their jobs if he doesn’t make sure his ‘hard edge’ mentality is instilled.
“Hell, I don’t care. I just want them to get coached...I’m convinced every player has it in them. I’m not just talking about here, I’m talking about everywhere,” Rodriguez said.
“It’s our job, and I’m not doing our players any service if we don’t coach and get the very best out of them. I have failed them if that happens.”
But given that it’s quite early in his second tenure at West Virginia and that he has that belief that all athletes possess such a competitive edge as he’s looking for, he’s still optimistic as the Mountaineers continue along with their spring practices.
“I wasn’t really happy with all the things I had to yell at today but I didn’t see anything that couldn’t be corrected,” Rodriguez said.
