It can be hard to get a culture implemented as a first-year head coach, and that is something that WVU football head coach Rich Rodriguez is struggling with right now.
It's been 17 years before this season since Rodriguez coached at WVU, and with his return has come a roster overhaul the need to implement his brand of locker room culture, which he often refers to as "hard edge." When asked on Tuesday during his weekly press conference if any miscalculations were made in regards to the implementation of the right culture, Rodriguez fully opened up and admitted that might be the case.
"That's probably a deep introspection that I probably did have a little bit. I still think you've got to have something that you build your program around and it's got to be the message from day one," Rodriguez said.
"My expectation was probably higher, or I thought it would happen faster than it did. You know what I mean? I think maybe after the Pitt game I thought, well I was there, but it really wasn't. It's there to some degree, but not ingrained in everything in the program like it needs to be. And I'm not just talking about "hard edge." But like, when it's truly the culture that we want and need and will have, you won't have one player loafing or one player taking a play off or one player being soft at any time."
Defensive coordinator Zac Alley also spoke on the same subject when asked Tuesday, and he attributed some of the struggles to a combination of the amount of new players on the roster that have never been under this system before, as well as previous coaching influences they've had.
It can be hard to get players to be bought in to a culture when they've experienced different systems at different programs and now they're in a new one for the first year. He also understands that the task of getting the culture right is more difficult after the slow start to the season.
"I do feel that. You just watch the amount of loafs and things happening in the [UCF] game, I called it out right on the first series," Alley said. "When you replace 71 guys, no one has been around us for an extended period of time...you're trying to create buy-in from those guys all the time, and obviously losing doesn't help that. The key for us is how can we continue to hold thing to a standard of how we're going to do what we do."
Rodriguez had taken accountability for many of the program issues already in the same press conference, and earlier in the week spoke on his radio show about the team's lack of intensity and lack of identity being issues. He reiterated that he and his staff have failed in their job to get that aspect right, and it's a top priority to get it fixed.
"That's probably the most disappointing thing that we have to get corrected as coaches, is that how we played in that [UCF] game effort wise and competitive wise...it can't ever happen again. I think it was a little my expectations that we could teach it, I thought we could teach it better, and we haven't. We failed as coaches to get that."