On Friday afternoon, West Virginia athletics director Wren Baker officially introduced Rich Rodriguez as the Mountaineers’ next head coach.

Below are full quotes from today’s press conference.

“My goodness, it’s great. This is really surreal. It’s great to be home. Should never have left. I am very, very grateful for the opportunity to return home and become your head football coach at West Virginia University.”

“I want every player who has ever played for a coach here at West Virginia – from Coach Bowden to Coach Cignetti to Coach Nehlen to myself, from Coach Holgorsen to Coach Brown to Coach Stewart – every one of you former athletes are happy to return home to West Virginia at any time. Always.”

“I understand that there are fans who are upset. At least they care, right? Sometimes not everything is as you think. But I made a mistake. My promise is not just to the people who are upset, but to everyone here and everyone who has been very, very supportive… I will earn your support. We will regain your support and trust. This is what I am committed to and have been thinking about before this opportunity. This is my home. This is such a great state. I will prove to them that the man on my right made the right decision.”

“There are a lot of opinions and a lot of them are uneducated and some of them don’t know the resources. But we’ve tried to build the best soccer program in America in every place we’ve been, and some have had different challenges. I’m really proud of what happened at Jax State, the players and staff we had there. We went from a 1-AA team to a 1-A team, and no one has ever done that, going to two bowls in a row and winning a conference championship in our second year. There are a lot of Power Four teams that don’t want to play Jax State right now, I can tell you that. As I mentioned before, if I were the same coach now as I was in 2007, I would not have followed my own guidelines for my players and my staff to get better every day. I know the landscape has changed. The goalposts moved and we moved with them. The great thing is that this opportunity wasn’t just good for me because I was at home. Not just because I wanted to come back and make it right, but because the school, Wren (Baker) and everyone involved with President Gee and the board are committed to us having a seat at the table and trying to win . They’re not just trying to keep up. They want to win and we are used to winning here.”

“The biggest change is the transfer portal. Guys are free agents every year and get paid. Not everything is bad, but you have to be able to do it. When Coach Nehlen won here, when I had some success here, whenever they had success here, you had really, really good players and you trained them really hard. This formula has not changed and that is the key to our success. We’re going to find really good players that want to be at West Virginia and they’re going to play really hard and then we’re going to win.”

“I have a five-year contract but I would have signed a life contract. But if I had lost, you would have killed me.”

“The difference in recruiting is that we are recruiting right now because we are in the transfer portal. Normally December was a quieter time, the first few weeks of January were a quieter time and then you hope to have everyone signed by February. Now you’ve had people in the portal for about a week and a half and you have to try to retain people. I don’t want to lose really good players entering the portal, so that’s a top priority. The second priority is to try better to find some people we need through the portal. We have to evaluate our current players and judge how good they are, and then we have to be completely honest with our guys, not just now, but certainly in the spring about where they are. I don’t want to have a guy and tell him you’re in the starting XI, but he’s going to be in the third team and probably has to go somewhere else.”

“I don’t know if it’s completely different from a footballing perspective, skill-wise or schematic-wise or whatever. It’s just a difference in location. You compete with most schools in the Big East in recruiting because everyone is in the same region. Now everyone is everywhere, but thanks to the transfer portal, recruiting is also everywhere. When I talked to Wren about it and looked at the Big 12, I thought I might know these teams better than any other league because of my time in the PAC 12. You’re talking Arizona, Arizona State, Utah…even played BYU a few times. I probably know these programs, know these regions, know how they recruit or how they have recruited in the past more than any other league.”

“It depends on the coordinator I hire. I’ve spoken to some who are different. And on defense everyone plays the same thing now, whether it’s an odd stack or an even front. Everyone has certain personnel packages they use for their own defense, but I’ll pick the D-coordinator first. I’m going to have a really good one because I have the resources to hire a really, really good one and then I’m going to build out the defensive staff from there. There’s no particular plan that I want other than I want to be really aggressive and kind of force the problem on the other team.”

“The pace and the fast game, I always thought… who wants to watch a bunch of fat guys holding hands? When we crowd together, it’s like playing tricks on us. If you’re sitting in the stands, I want to give you plenty of time… I guess we’re selling beer now, right? We’ll have plenty of time, TV timeouts and possession changes where you can buy your beer, but when we’re on offense you won’t have time to buy it between games.”

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