Rich Rodriguez is only three games into his second tenure at West Virginia, but it hasn’t taken him long to fan the flames of his program’s most heated rivalry.
Rodriguez’s Mountaineers team picked up their biggest win of the young season on Saturday, Sept. 13, defeating archrival Pitt 31-24 in overtime in the Backyard Brawl at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown, West Virginia — a game in which they stormed back from a 10-point deficit in the final six minutes of regulation before winning in the extra period.
That comeback involved a series of stoppages for injured Panthers players, delays that still gnawed at Rodriguez three days after the victory. Appearing on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Tuesday, Sept. 16, the Mountaineers’ coach joked with his former punter and the show’s eponymous host about the injury timeouts — and how quickly he believed Pitt’s players were able to recover before returning to the game.
“They had an inordinate amount of people that got hurt all the time,” Rodriguez said. “Some snaps, there were two or three guys who were getting hurt. I was amazed at that. Their training staff must be the best in the country because they all came back in the game. It was phenomenal how fast that medical staff of theirs got them healthy again to get back on the field after all those injuries.”
Between the fourth quarter and overtime, there were five different stoppages for an injured Pitt defensive player, one of which involved multiple Panthers. As they occurred, both Rodriguez and Mountaineers fans voiced their frustrations.
“I’m like, ‘They’ve got the worst luck in America,’” Rodriguez told McAfee. “There’s a guy falling down on every snap. I’d never seen nothing like that.”
With the win, Rodriguez moved to 5-3 all-time against Pitt, with the latest victory allowing the Mountaineers to bounce back from a Week 2 loss at Ohio.
Rodriguez was hired by West Virginia last December, allowing him to return to a school where he played and later coached. He went 60-26 in his first stint with the Mountaineers, from 2001-07, before leaving for Michigan.
“You’d think after 300-something games as a head coach that it would all kind of feel the same, but I was a little bit more emotional,” he said to McAfee. ‘I think it was maybe just because we won, it was our rival and all that, and there were 60-some thousand people. The game’s so important. I just think it was a combination of a lot of stuff. Being gone for 17 years, seeing what everybody put into this program.”