MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — When Rich Rodriguez was a kid, he went out to his yard to the garden in Grant Town, West Virginia. He went out to pick weeds..

“I hated pulling weeds,” Rodriguez said. “I’d rather do anything else than pull weeds… It’s miserable. Absolutely miserable.”

Rodriguez tried to play a sport to get out of pulling weeds. What sport? Any sport to get out of pulling weeds, even if it was lacrosse, which wasn’t popular around that time.

On Thursday, Rodriguez took the podium frustrated after practice No. 2. He said his team took a step back in a couple of ways, but the reason he was most frustrated was that the team wasn’t as tough as he wanted them to be, which he said after practice No. 1, there was no excuse for.

“I thought we were a little soft at times,” Rodriguez said. “We got some good in, but it wasn’t the step that we probably needed to take. We have to get better tomorrow.”

Soft and Rodriguez don’t mix well together. Rodriguez’s father would come home after a long day at work with black coal dust on his face from the mines, and Rodriguez spent most of his summers in the garden picking weeds, so there was no time to be soft.

He couldn’t wrap his head around why his players were soft. They had everything they needed to exceed.

“You know the people in this state, how they work,” Rodriguez said. “I mean, you’ve seen people. Whether they’re coal miners or anybody, it’s not always easy. Our guys got it pretty good. Y’all been through this building? Have you seen how we eat? You’ve seen all the services we have. They got it pretty good. They live in a fantasy world. I don’t mind telling them. We live, coaches, too, because we get these benefits. We live in a fantasy world. We want for nothing. You want food. You want medical help. You want job help. You want financial help. I mean, we got cold tubs, hot tubs. We even got an ice cream machine.”

Rodriguez talked about how he didn’t want to get political, but from 2001, when he first started coaching at WVU, to 2025, he feels athletes have gotten “softer.”

“I don’t really necessarily blame anybody, because everything they got around is how do they make it easier for you?” Rodriguez said. “They might make it easy instead of making things harder for them.”

This is a problem for Rodriguez because his coaching style is to play with a “hard edge,” meaning playing tough, hitting hard, moving bodies, no matter the circumstance, until after the whistle. Rodriguez thought, too, that now that they are getting paid, they can be pushed harder. He even banned his players from filming TikToks to remove any weakness.

Leading up to the first game, Rodriguez hopes to toughen up his players by figuratively getting them to pull weeds.

“You throw them out in the garden and don’t let them leave until they pull it,” Rodriguez said. “That’s it. Go pull or you can’t eat any of the beans. That’s it. You guys think I’m making up stories, but my mom, if you have ever been to my mom, ask her, ‘What did Rich hate to dead?’ I bet you top of the list, pulling weeds.”

On the first day of practice, which Rodriugez thought was pretty good for the first day, he said some of the wide receivers were cramping up because of the volume of his offense. He said he’s not opposed to still getting players in the transfer portal.

After the second day, Rodriguez brought back up the idea of getting players who are tougher out of the portal if the 115 he has on the roster aren’t as tough as he wants them to be.

“There are still 4,000 kids in the portal,” Rodriguez said. “I got a recruiting staff. I got a big old recruiting staff. They do a really nice job. They’re in. They’re still looking. We’re still looking.”

Rodriguez’s tone might seem harsh for the second day of the long camp, leading up to the first game, but he has a standard he wants met. Rodriguez didn’t watch much game film from the Neal Brown era, but he thought the team wasn’t tough at times, and Rodriguez wanted to change that.

Rodriguez is going to make sure his team is tough, whether that’s new players from the portal or just making his current players pick weeds.

Rodriguez’s dissatisfaction after practice two isn’t anything new. His wife, Miss. Rita, told him after practice that he’s always like this after the second practice, and Rodriguez agreed.

“I tried not to be,” Rodriguez said. “In fact, when I woke up this morning, I’m like boy, we had a pretty good practice yesterday. Im gonna have another good day. I’m not even going to have to yell. It’s just going to be probably a popsicle break, and another popsicle break afterwards.”