West Virginia University football coach Rich Rodriguez didn’t mince words about what areas of his roster needed help from the NCAA transfer portal.
“Every one,” he said.
Rodriguez didn’t have a stellar start to his second stint as head coach at his alma mater this past season, with the Mountaineers going 4-8 and finishing 14th out of 16 teams in the Big 12 Conference. And while Rodriguez hopes to fare better this year, about three-quarters of his 123-player roster didn’t stick around to find out.
Fellow Big 12 program Oklahoma State and Big Ten members Iowa State and Penn State were among the other Power Four conference schools that saw players run for the exits, but all three of those lost head coaches. In the highest level of college football, though, perhaps the greatest toll was at West Virginia, despite Rodriguez coming back.
When the season ended, the Mountaineers said goodbye to 40 seniors, then lost 50-plus players to the portal.
“I don’t think we were caught completely by surprise,” West Virginia athletic director Wren Baker said.
Baker said in a recent interview the new environment of third-party name, image and likeness deals and direct revenue-sharing payments to athletes that varies by school “is really conducive to high turnover.”
In the meantime, Baker said Rodriguez has his full support.
“I have a lot of confidence in where we’re going and the plan that Rich has developed and is executing,” Baker said.
That plan includes going back to the portal, and Rodriguez already has several transfers enrolled for the spring semester along with three dozen of the whopping 49 recruits from the December signing period for players from the high school ranks. He also has tentative commitments from 20 other potential transfers.
“Obviously we’ve had a lot of needs, of things to fix,” Rodriguez said in December amid the early signing period.
Much of that had to do with size. The Mountaineers “weren’t big enough” on the offensive and defensive lines, at linebacker and at cornerback. While some of those needs were addressed with recruits from the prep level, Rodriguez wanted to find more linemen in the portal because “we need some grown men in certain spots.”
West Virginia’s roster took a hit after the 2024 season after the firing of Neal Brown. Rodriguez arrived after the December 2024 signing period, and it took him two months to finish hiring his staff. He inherited Brown’s recruits, then had to desperately look in the portal to fill massive roster gaps.
“We went portal heavy, a lot more one-year guys than I would ever want to have,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t want to have to flip the entire roster.”
Rodriguez, who didn’t have to deal with NIL and revenue sharing during his first stint as West Virginia’s coach from 2001 to 2007, brought 80 new players to the roster in 2025. However, injuries took a heavy toll in the offensive backfield alone.
Rodriguez used four starters at quarterback and four at running back. Seven of those eight players entered the portal, the exception being quarterback Scotty Fox, who started the final six games and will compete with a new group in the spring that includes Oklahoma transfer Michael Hawkins Jr.
Many of the West Virginia players who entered the portal still haven’t found a new home.
Baker said it would be a “useful exercise” to eventually compare apples to apples such as West Virginia’s attrition to other schools with a current second-year coach. He pointed to Bill Belichick at North Carolina and Barry Odom at Purdue.
North Carolina had an estimated 30 players leave in the portal, while Purdue lost more than 20. UCF’s Scott Frost, who just finished his first season of a second stint with the Knights, had at least three dozen players exit.
For the moment, West Virginia’s roster has been replenished to 95 players with plenty of room left for new talent.
Two decades ago, Rodriguez won four Big East titles in five years with the Mountaineers, who moved to the Big 12 in 2012. He’s still trying to restore a winning climate in Morgantown, where the home team hasn’t been ranked since 2018.
“This is such a fluid situation these days in college sports,” Rodriguez said. “We look at the portal every day, for every position, all year.”