Rich Rodriguez officially returns to West Virginia

Rich Rodriguez is heading back to West Virginia.

According to ESPN, the Mountaineers announced Thursday that they had re-hired Rodriguez 17 years after he left for Michigan. The Jacksonville State coach will succeed Neal Brown after Brown was fired at the end of the season.

Rodriguez was West Virginia’s coach from 2001 through 2007. The Mountaineers were 60-26 in his time with the school and won 32 games over his final three seasons in Morgantown.

That stretch of football was defined by Rodriguez’s spread-option offense and teams across college football rushed to copy it. West Virginia scored nearly 40 points per game in 2007 and were in line to make the BCS title game with a win 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 got him the head coaching job at Michigan, succeeding Lloyd Carr. His time with the Wolverines didn’t go as well. Michigan was 15-22 in Rodriguez’s three seasons with the school and he was fired after a 7-6 season in 2010. Before going 3-9 in Rodriguez’s first season in 2008, Michigan hadn’t missed a bowl game since 1974 and had the longest active bowl streak in the country.

Rodriguez spent the 2011 season out of coaching before heading to Arizona in 2012. The Wildcats won 26 games over his first three seasons and made the Fiesta Bowl at the end of the 2014 season. But the Wildcats never won more than seven games in a season after that. Rodriguez was fired at the end of the 2017 season following an investigation by the school after his former administrative assistant filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment. The suit was eventually 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 up to the top level of college football in 2023. The Gamecocks have gone 9-4 in each of the past two seasons and won the Conference USA championship game over Western Kentucky on Friday.

The Mountaineers, meanwhile, have desperately been searching to get back to the sustained success the school had in the 2000s. Bill Stewart went 9-4 for three straight seasons after succeeding Rodriguez and Dana Holgorsen was 10-3 in his first season in 2011. Since then, WVU has won 10 games just once (2016) and was 37-35 in Brown’s six seasons.