The next big domino to topple over on the college football head-coaching carousel is right there in front of us. According to ESPN's Pete Thamel, "West Virginia has completed in-person interviews for the school's next football coach and school officials are expected to make a decision in the next 24-48 hours." That news dropped a little after 9:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday night. So Thursday evening it is!
Where things stand now, West Virginia is one of the last remaining head-coaching vacancies in college football. Only WVU and North Carolina are still open in the Power Four. Over in the Group of Five, jobs like Ohio, Sam Houston and UNLV still need to be filled. Surely, the coaching carousel will kick into higher gear whenever another marquee job opens up. West Virginia could keep it open.
The idea behind moving on from Neal Brown was for the Mountaineers to stop being so bland and start getting back to being a fun football team over in Appalachia. One such candidate for the job is their former head coach and defensive back from yesteryear in Rich Rodriguez, who is doing extraordinary things at the Group of Five level over at Jacksonville State. Would he return to WVU?
The clock is ticking. More importantly, we just saw UCF re-hire its former head coach in Scott Frost.
Sources: West Virginia has completed in-person interviews for the school's next football coach and school officials are expected to make a decision in the next 24-48 hours.
— Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) December 11, 2024
Both Frost and Rodriguez had great successes at one school before flaming out at a bigger program.
West Virginia must decide if Mountaineers want to re-hire Rich Rodriguez
The best head-coaching candidate in this cycle decided to stay put at Tulane in Jon Sumrall. He would have been a top candidate at any number of jobs, including all four Power Four gigs that initially became available in North Carolina, Purdue, UCF and West Virginia. Purdue hired former UNLV and Missouri head coach Barry Odom. UCF obviously re-hired Frost after failing recently at Nebraska.
The idea of reaching into one's past to solve a current issue rarely works. In college football, we have seen North Carolina re-hire Mack Brown, Louisville re-hire Bobby Petrino, Kansas State re-hire Bill Snyder and UMass re-hire Don Brown, among many others. All of whom had tremendous success in their initial run at their previous posts. However, success the second time around was fleeting at best.
To put a metaphor out there, re-hiring a head coach who used to work for you is like being on an out-and-back roller coaster. It is fast with plenty ups and downs. While each hill is incredibly thrilling, it is never as high as the previous one, due to friction and gravity. At the end of the day, you return back to the station some 3,000 feet later after a series of drops, turns, curves and the occasional bunny hill.
What I am getting at is West Virginia has the potential to make the best hire in the weakest offseason cycle I can honestly remember in quite some time. Right now, the three best hires in my estimation are Purdue landing Barry Odom who is overqualified for that job, Utah State doing the same by poaching Bronco Mendenhall away from New Mexico and Sam Houston's K.C. Keeler leading Temple.
Overall, we need to ask ourselves this: Who says you can't go home? Bon Jovi made a lot of money asking and answering that question, but hear me out. If you think you can go back to a familiar place in a different time and expect for life to be as good as you thought it was there previously, you are sure to be disappointed. Rodriguez may end up being the hire, but the West Virginia job has changed.
WVU is no longer a juggernaut in the old Big East, but rather stuck in the soft middle of the Big 12.