There's been a lot of talk this season about the limitations of WVU football's offensive line, and it doesn't seem like those conversations will be going away any time soon.
The Mountaineers suffered a 38-24 loss on Friday night against the BYU Cougars, falling to 2-4 overall on the season and 0-3 in Big 12 play. The offense did seem at times to compete a little bit better, but the offensive line still struggled to get any sort of push off the ball and was stuffed in short-yardage situations several times. And even with the rest of the offense having some occasional sparks, it often felt like West Virginia never had quite the juice they needed to keep up with BYU because of the play in the trenches. Head coach Rich Rodriguez has been seemingly patient with his offensive line this season, but he looked to have lost a lot of that patience after Friday's performance.
"We got to get some help. I mean hell, if you can't score from the one-inch line, you know, that's ridiculous," Rodriguez said in his postgame press conference. "It's not good, we got to get better than that."
Rich Rod is really seeming to hint in his press conferences that his team is just not talented enough. Especially at the O-Line. He says he knows what he has to do after the season.
— WVU Recruiting (@WVU_Recruiting) October 4, 2025
WVU's offense is going to struggle until changes are made on the right side of the offensive line, in my opinion.
— Joe Smith (@joesmithwrites) October 4, 2025
At one point, Rodriguez was asked if having young quarterbacks limited his offense – he lamented that young quarterbacks were a small part of it, but a bigger part was that "we can't pass protect long enough if we do call a drop-back pass." At another point, while discussing Tye Edwards' struggles in his return game, he said that "we got to help him a little bit too up front."
However, Rodriguez's frustration was perhaps best exemplified when the notion was floated that the offensive line had blocked a little better, which he quickly dismissed. He didn't think there was much to be impressed with about his line's performance at all.
"I don't know if we blocked any better, I didn't think that. We had to have the quarterback run game to run anything, so I'm not sure we blocked any better," he said.
It is worth noting that after backups Malik Agbo, Josh Aisosa, Donovan Haslam, and Carson Lee all saw significant action against Utah, Rodriguez said that Agbo and Haslam would "play more" and that "a couple other guys" would also likely get a shot. However, the starting unit remained the same as it has been most of the season, and the reserve offensive lineman saw little action until the end of the night.
"I mean, we got some guys who got some reps today, but I didn't notice anything different. But, you know, we're going to evaluate everything," Rodriguez said about his backups on the offensive line Friday night.