Rich Rodriguez 'frustrated' with West Virginia's injury luck in preseason practices

Keeping your roster healthy can be the difference between a successful season, and a losing record. It's a lesson that a veteran coach like Rich Rodriguez knows well. And one that he got a little more exposure to last season, when poor injury luckplayed a role in a four-win season.

And during preseason practices this year, it appears thatplayers are getting a bit banged up again. While there didn't seem to be a ton of major injuries to write home about, Rodriguezexpressed what he described as frustrationwith smaller injuries adding up.

"You know, I get a little frustrated when we have some soft tissue stuff, you know, seven, eight guys with hamstring strains or whatever it is," Rodriguez said. "And, you know, it's nothing anybody's done wrong. It just I guess it just kind of happens, you know."

Rich Rodriguez blames poor luck on WVU football's minor injury struggles in camp

It's not the first time we've seen such injury issues pile up in camp, as Rodriguez discussed the issue last year at this time at well.

When asked if the organization has come together to discuss ways to mitigate the issue, he made a point to defend his strength staff and coaching staff. He make sure that both he and his staff look at everything to understand why it's happening, and how to fix it. In his eyes, most of what he's been dealing with so far is plain bad luck.

"I've never had injuries, in 29 years I hadn't had – well no, I had one year where I had a rash of injuries at certain positions," he said.

"Like last year it seemed like it was running backs and quarterbacks. I had one other year where I had quarterbacks was like to the fifth guy. And then mike linebackers, I was down to like my sixth mike linebacker. I think I was at Arizona [at the time], and it was like, God, this will never happen again. Well, it did and it was just freaky luck."

So what's the solution in such a situation. Rodriguez believes you have to address it by maintaining solid depth on your team – which he believes is harder than ever before in the NIL and revenue share era where money is more spread out. But he does feel he's better equipped in terms of roster depth to handle it this season than he was last year.

"But I do think we should have better depth this year. I feel better about our depth this year. And we purposely tried to address that because just in case we had bad luck."

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