NEW ORLEANS 鈥 Entering the final year of his initial four-year contract as Marshall鈥檚 football coach, Charles Huff said talks about his future…
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HUNTINGTON 鈥 At every stop that led Charles Huff to becoming Marshall University鈥檚 football coach, he built relationships along the way.
Bryce Casto has worn many hats throughout his time in West Virginia high school sports.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) 鈥 It caught us all by surprise, the move 性视界传媒 President Gordon Gee made that mid-November day, but no one more so than Athletic Director Shane Lyons.
Lyons had spent seven years on the job, going back to 2015, and he was neither wildly liked nor intensely disliked.
He had brought massive improvements to the facilities at 性视界传媒, from the Coliseum to Milan Puskar Stadium, but he had failed to succeed at doing the one job he had been hired to do 鈥 improve a stagnant football program.
So it was that on Monday, Nov. 15, it was announced that 性视界传媒 was moving on from Lyons, willing to pay off more than $2 million in buyout money.
Changing the man at the top is usually the last move any organization makes. The coach is always fired before the boss, but here Lyons' dynamics in the job had made that a difficult option to exercise.
He had hired Neal Brown as football coach, a move, it must be said, that was popular at the moment. First, Brown was replacing Dana Holgorsen, who seemingly had tired of being the 性视界传媒 coach even more than the fans had tired of having him as coach.
Under Lyons/Holgorsen, the 性视界传媒 program had slipped badly, and there wasn't much football talent on hand when Lyons grabbed Brown away from Troy, where he'd been a popular, successful coach who had upset a couple of the biggest names in college football.
Two years into the climb Brown had asked Mountaineer fans to trust, he had just put up the only winning season he would see in his four years to date. Lyons looked around and saw interest from other schools in hiring him.
So he made an executive decision, one which would, in the end, lead to the day he was fired, giving Brown a two-year extension on his contract through 2026 and giving him a hefty buyout package, one that would cost the school about $20 million plus his assistants if fired after a 5-7 2022 season.
Fans wanted him fired. Didn't cost them anything.
Gee, however, felt the real problem wasn't with Brown but with Lyons and pulled the plug, installing a rising star in his school administration in Rob Alsop while conducting a short search that led to North Texas's AD, Wren Baker.
"We had a challenging football year, as we all know," Gee said in making the announcement. One of the things that I started realizing is the fact that we really did put our football coach in a very challenging position because we played two Power 5 teams right off the bat. The other thing is, the recent process came out of noting that we had the toughest football schedule in the country. And that fact that we've gone 5-7 in a very competitive environment has been something that obviously I take a lot of pride in because given everything, I think we played rather well."
In other words, Gee was saying in essence that he agreed with Lyons, who wasn't going to fire Brown.
"Secondly of all, I talked to a lot of people. One of the advantages of being a university president for 42 years, I have a lot of folks. I've worked with coaches and others. Almost to a person, they believe that our coach had great opportunities in front of him and that we needed to try to provide the kind of support and structure that would allow him to be successful," Gee went on.
Sounds good, but over it all was the buyout and the hardships it would put on the program financially, to say nothing of putting a new football coach in a similar predicament that Brown found when he took over.
Lyons, for his part, declared he was being used as a scapegoat, that the decision to hire Brown was hardly his alone and that Gee and the Board of Governors had written off on it as well, just as they had on the extension he handed out.
Gee's decision hardly cleared Brown of all wrongdoing. In fact, while trying to give him a vote of confidence, he did so while hiring Baker with one mandate, and that was to spend the year assessing Brown.
It was like putting the football coach on probation. Meanwhile, the rest of the department was being evaluated as well ... perhaps leading to a complete overhaul within a year.
First, of course, Baker must put his management team in place and get it into the new philosophies he will bring with him.
Look for 性视界传媒 to move 鈥 along with the changing Big 12, which is expanding and looking toward creating a younger, more hip national image to market 鈥 toward a different approach toward financing and promoting its product.
The combination of the transfer portal and NIL money have changed the landscape completely, and Baker was hired as someone who would address that, but it must be looked at with reservations, for he has never really run a Power 5 program with a budget approaching $100 million.
To help keep 性视界传媒 competitive in NIL money, a group of alumni and donors got together and founded the Country Roads Trust, an independent group that would line up deals for players such as clinics, autograph sessions, online opportunities and endorsements.
This is the way the nation has approached the situation as it has developed. The trust is not part of the athletic department but has its approval and cooperation in any legal way it can.
There were a couple of other administrative moves that should be addressed before turning the page on the calendar to a new year.
In July, Keli Zinn, the first woman to lead the 性视界传媒 athletics department when she was named interim athletic director in 2015 between Oliver Luck and Shane Lyons, left her job as Executive Deputy Athletic Director to take a similar position at LSU.
She was replaced by Natasha Oakes as senior associate athletics director and senior woman's administrator.
In addition, former 性视界传媒 sports information director Shelly Poe was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Football Writers Association of America as a trailblazer for women in the field of sports information. The West Virginia native currently is the football SID at Auburn.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) 鈥 As if Neal Brown wasn't hanging onto his job as West Virginia football coach by a thread 鈥 OK, a very expensive tread, but still one that doesn't seem strong enough to be capable of holding his career together if he doesn't find a way to have a winning season 鈥 now he needs a needle to go with it.
See, day by day, minute by minute, it seems his football team is unraveling.
If the No. 1 requirement for a football coach is to be able to recruit talent -- and there seems to be near unanimity on that count -- the No. 2 requirement is to keep the talent he has.
And that's just not happening within his program.
Once again, the transfer portal has sprung a leak and it's going to take more than just a patch to fix it.
Last year it was in the secondary with players skipping town like they'd hung bad paper all over the city.
This year it's the wide receiver room and the latest to AWOL is Kaden Prather, who had been the last man standing.
He had the Mountaineers passing attack firmly in his grasp, the one piece they had left to build around, but they now have fumbled the ball and let him get away.
No one ever compared Prather to Jerry Rice, but he had shown tremendous promise. And any coach needs to a) have a quarterback and b) someone to catch that quarterback's passes.
Count 'em, Brown is now without his top four receivers, all of them who had eligibility left.
Bryce Ford-Wheaton left to test the NFL draft. Sam James, too.
Reese Smith opted for the portal.
You might remember Winston Wright Jr. and Sean Ryan, whom 性视界传媒 rescued from the football scrap heap. They jumped ship in the past.
Looks like Nicco Marchiol might wind up throwing the ball to Garrett Greene, which would be all right if both of them weren't quarterbacks and now wondering who the hell they are going to throw to.
The news broke at midday on social media with Prather offering up the same babble that all the others take out of the sports agent's book of cliched goodbye notes:
"I would like to thank the great state of West Virginia and all Mountaineer fans over the years. You are the most loyal fans a player could ever hope for and I have enjoyed playing for you. I would like to thank coach Brown and the other coaches and strength staff for the great opportunity presented to me. I will remember all the friendships made. With that being said, I will be doing what鈥檚 best for me and entering the transfer portal. Please respect my decision."
Wonder if these guys even stop by the facility to say goodbye.
Coaches ought to be replied on social media like this.
"Thanks, and don't let the door hit you in the rear on the way out."
He thanks the coaches for the opportunities they presented to him. He will remember the friendships he made.
But in the end, they didn't matter.
What mattered was the one sentence buried there in the middle:
"...I will be doing what's best for me."
In the end, that's what it's all about ... "me."
You remember the old sign that used to hang on locker room walls: "There is no 'I' in team."
There's another one that all these transfers can hang on their bedroom walls: "There is M and E in team."
I know, if you don't look out for yourself, who will? I know players transferred before the portal. I know professional athletes go from team to team ... but all of it has screwed up our sports and taken to areas it shouldn't have gone.
There is no loyalty, no pretense that there's loyalty.
Thank you coach, thank you teammates, thank you fans, thank you community ... maybe we can catch up again some time. You might even stop by an autograph show and I'll sign something for you for $50.
Bob Huggins managed to save his team this year because of the portal, proof that isn't all bad, but he also has noted that there are four or five hundred kids in the portals that don't find new homes and how many more worsen their situations rather than improve them?"
I know, I'm old and I'm old-fashioned.
Stop for a moment. Sit back and think about why you enjoyed sports and why today it has lost all the things that drew you to being a fan.
The inmates are running the institutions and that's just not the way it's supposed to be.
They are called 鈥渋nitial counters.鈥
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) 鈥 West Virginia has faced some trying times in its athletic history.
Times were so bad once that a Hall of Fame football coach, Bobby Bowden, was hung in effigy.
They bounced back.
Then there was the Frank Cignetti era, ill and weak, the football coach went 17-27 in four years.
He, too, wound up in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Gale Catlett suffered through an 8-20 final season with one win and 15 Big East losses.
He, though, will be remembered as the winningest coach in Mountaineer basketball history.
And Bob Huggins has had two losing seasons in his last four years.
On Saturday, however, he learns if he will be inducted in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Bad years? Yes. Bad periods of time? Yes.
Never, however, has 性视界传媒's place in big time college athletics ever been threatened as it is today.
A combination of the transfer portal and NIL rules have changed the game from amateur to professional. The change has been transformational in nature, widening the gap between the haves and have nots and ripping away at the core of what made college sports what it always had been.
There's no more boola, boola.
That has been replaced by moolah, moolah.
No one wins games for the Gipper any longer. Today, instead, you play to become the Big Tipper.
There is no commitment any longer.
The biggest untruth there is now is the cliche "There is no I in team."
The Alabamas, Ohio States and Oklahomas of the world are awash in talent, while the West Virginias have become nothing but a developmental stopover for their most talented players.
Build a team? How? You have a good player for maybe two years. A great one you get no shot at.
It's as if it hits home every day in places like Morgantown, be it football or basketball. One day basketball player Sean McNeil announces he's leaving, next day football player Akheem Mesidor.
You don't hear anything about members of the rowing team leaving.
But 21 football players, most of the starters, have left since the end of the 2020 season.
Blame the players? No, you can't do that, although one suspects the attitude in today's world might be best represented by players wearing uniform shirts not with the team name on the front and their name on the back, but vice versa.
Blame the coach? Could be, if players are leaving because he is mistreating them or simply such a bad coach that he will never win?
Blame the athletic director? The school president? The cheerleaders?
Damnit, you have to blame someone.
Or do you?
If anyone should be mad today it is 性视界传媒's football coach Neal Brown, who lost Mesidor unexpectedly.
He says he isn't angry. Sad, not mad, is the word he uses.
He believes in himself, his values, his approach.
"I'm not bitter. I'm not down on the transfer portal. I'm not down on college football, the direction. I'm not down on the profession," he said on Tuesday in a rare press conference to announce that Mesidor was leaving, something previously left to players via their social media accounts.
"What I'll say here, after having some thought, as I sit here, I'm more resolute, more confident and more committed to my beliefs in how to run a program than I've ever been," he went on.
"I believe in pouring into the student-athletes and going all in. I believe in building an infrastructure and surrounding them with support staff that pours into them, serves, develops them and creates a culture of accountability."
That is all well and good, if he can find some way to go beyond accountability but creates a culture of pride in the school, pride in the state, pride in the team and a realization that there is more to being an athlete than just how many stars are listed with your name.
"Here's the thing," Brown said. "There's going to be some days that are tough, like the last day and a half where you lose some guys that you really, really invested in. But I believe if you do it that way, there are going to be a lot more success stories than there are ones that go away. I believe that with every ounce of my being.
"I believe in the young men in our program. We've had five practices here and it's the most excitement we've had, the most competitive practices we've had. "We've had different college coaches talking about how well our guys are practicing.
"I feel very confident that the '23 recruiting class will be the best we've signed here."
That may be, but the big question is whether they will be here in '24 and '25.
"I'll say this," Brown said. "The best is yet to come."
If you don't believe in yourself, who will believe in you?
"I want to leave with this: In 154 days 鈥 that's what it is; we've got the countdown going 鈥 in 154 days we're going to show up at Heinz Field and have a damn good football team line up, a group of guys who believe and are committed to the university and the state and play their asses off for the name on the front and not on the back."
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) 鈥 The rebranding of Rich Rodriguez as a major college football coach has begun.
Again.
We've seen this before ... first at Michigan after his escape into the night to get away from his alma mater after a crushing, embarrassing defeat to Pitt, the one team he couldn't lost to, not as a four-touchdown favorite, not with a match up against Ohio State for the national championship.
Didn't work. Three years and he was gone.
On to Arizona. Again, didn't work. Oh, the football was fine, but there were some personal innuendoes tossed around, things unproven and denied as recently again as this week.
But he had outlived his welcome.
He was out of football. He came back at Ole Miss and coached quarterbacks 鈥 especially son Rhett 鈥 at Louisiana-Monroe assisting Terry Bowden.
But things change in sports, in this era often within the twinkling of an eye. Don't believe it?
Ask Tiger Woods. Ask Muhammad Ali. Ask Kobe Bryant. Ask Alex Rodriguez.
It happens and now Rich Rodriguez is trying to add his name to the list at Jacksonville State, newly brought into FBS football as a member of Conference USA.
He said in his introductory press conference on Wednesday that this wasn't a move made as a first step back to the big time, but once you've smelled the roses, it's hard to live off the smell of petunias.
When introduced at the press conference, he reached right into the bag of coaching humor as the sound of a standing ovation began to die down.
"I hope you're still standing in nine months," he said.
"I'm not looking for the next thing," he told the gathering. "I've been there, done that. I think some of the most memorable moments of my coaching career were when I was at Glenville State College, which was a little Division II school in the early '90s.
"Building that program up and seeing us win championships and stuff like that are probably still our greatest memories."
Certainly, greater than his exit from 性视界传媒, which will probably disqualify him from ever coming home no matter how much success he has. Oh, there are those who would take him back 鈥 after all, they were years of great success until the trap door sprung open and fell through.
But if he is to rehabilitate himself and his reputation, what better place to start than to remind this upstart school of his roots at Glenville State.
However, stop me if you heard this one many years ago.
"Glenville State was the best program in America to take over," Rodriguez told the boosters, administrators, players and media on hand. "They went 0-10 the year before, got shut out seven times and only scored 20 points the whole year. So, my first year there I got a standing ovation on the first play and I'm like 'Hell, I ain't never leaving, this place is beautiful.'
"We won one game, which is the best coaching job I ever did in my life. We went 1-7-1, I think."
Rich Rod was letting them know he was one of them. Underdog, country boy who could take an upstart like Jacksonville State 鈥 which did upset Florida State this year 鈥 and show the way to the top.
Rodriguez's next head coaching job was at 性视界传媒, down the road from where he grew up and from Glenville, and he had to build his program, which would be a complete departure from the legend he was replacing 鈥 Don Nehlen.
The start was rocky.
"I think we won three the first year, then nine the second year. That was good, because I was from 性视界传媒, then won three and was not from West Virginia, then won nine and I was a homeboy again.
"Then came Michigan," he said.
We were eager to hear more about 性视界传媒 and how he walked out on the team and school the moment they needed him most, completely changing the history of the football program, but he wasn't going public with the behind-the-doors antics that went on then.
He moved on to his experience at Michigan.
"Oh, don't get started on Michigan," he said. "That was a little more difficult than I thought coming into it. We thought we had it going in the third year and had everybody coming back, but we didn't see the fourth year."
And so it went ... Rich Rod, who had become a man without a home when he left 性视界传媒, promising this would be his home, without really promising.
Is he looking at it as his last job in his career, he was asked.
"Absolutely. If you will sign me to a lifetime contract," he joked. "There's so many crazy things going on in football and coaches say 'Never say never' but I tell every young coach that you should take every job and treat it like it's the last job you're ever going to have ... because it might be. That's what I'm doing.
"The difference with me, I've had the big jobs and all that. Now, you put a 10-year contract in front of me, old Coach Rod is going to sign it, just so you know. It might not be 10 years for $110 million, but nonetheless."
The problem is, when you think back on his exit from 性视界传媒, as long ago as it was, do you think he really can be tied to Jacksonville State by a 10-year contract?
There's still some rehabbing he has to do to sell that to the people up here who backed him with their hearts and souls, people who eventually would have even forgiven the loss to Pitt if he kept winning 10 and 11 games a year.
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WV News) 鈥 Former West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez will be named the head coach at Jacksonville State as that program makes the move to FBS for the 2023 season, according to reports.
Rodriguez, who played at North Marion in high school and 性视界传媒 in college, coached his alma mater from 2001 to 2007, posting a 60-26. He led the Mountaineers to victory in the Sugar Bowl after the 2005 season and to the cusp of the national championship game in 2007.
He left for Michigan but only lasted three years, going 15-22.
He then was the head coach at Arizona from 2012-2017, but was fired after an investigation following a lawsuit from his administrative assistant.
Rodriguez was then offensive coordinator at Ole Miss and Louisiana-Monroe.
