With Rich Rodriguez back at West Virginia, why are there so many retread coaches?

The West Virginia Mountaineers have become the latest team to run it back for 2024, as Bruce Feldman of The Athletic reported that Rich Rodriguez was set to be named their head coach.

This will be Rodriguez's second stint as Mountaineers head coach; he previously ran the program in Morgantown from 2001-2007, amassing a 60-26 record and overseeing their rise to pushing towards national title considerations during the BCS era.

Rodriguez also has the distinction of being the second head coach making a second tour of duty at the school where he made his name; Scott Frost, most recently seen trying and failing to rebuild Nebraska's struggling football program, returned to UCF for his second tour as their head coach as well.

North Carolina marked the third power four program to opt for a retread model this offseason, although they managed to pull down legendary former Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. And Purdue marked the fourth school to opt for a previous head coach, hiring UNLV's Barry Odom, who was previously fired at Missouri. With so many coaches getting a new lease on life in the Power Four, it begs the question: why now? Why the sudden interest in giving these coaches a second chance, and in the case of Rodriguez and Frost, why return to the coach who ditched you for greener pastures?

The answer is multi-faceted and complex, but the simplest answer is: they were the best options willing to take the job.

Let's start with the easiest one: Belichick and North Carolina. The Tar Heels have been seen as a sleeping giant in college football for decades now, but the job remains a less than desireable one. No one has been able to consistently crack the code to success in Chapel Hill, and with a vocal booster core, and an NIL situation that former head coach Mack Brown was less than thrilled by, it wasn't exactly a dream destination for a lot of up-and-coming assistants, or upper-level group of five head coaches (think Jon Sumrall at Tulane).

Enter Belichick; the NFL legend was eager to get back in the game someplace to prove he's still got it, and the Tar Heels were desperate to make a splashy hire to revive the flagging enthusiasm around the program. Sure, he's never coached in college, and the idea of the famously surly coach having to glad hand car dealership owners from Tobacco Road is one that I can't stop laughing about. On the surface, it seemed like a logical match.

So too with Odom and Purdue. Odom isn't in the same boat as the other retreads on this list; he's always had a reputation as a great coach; he won six or more games in three of his four years at Missouri, but had the misfortune of replacing Gary Pinkel, who built the Tigers into a program good enough to catch the SEC's eye. So, he was unceremoniously shown the door, but found even more success at UNLV, building the Runnin' Rebels into a successful Mountain West program, something they've never been before.

The Boilermakers have tried the up-and-coming young coach; recently fired head coach Ryan Walters had been a promising defensive coordinator at Illinois prior to taking the Purdue job, so they wanted something different. It's also not been an easy place to win, historically; their best season in the last 20 years was a 9-4 record under now-Louisville coach Jeff Brohm in 2022.

Meanwhile, Odom clearly wanted to get back to the Power Four. He's a defense-first coach who ran an incredibly fun offensive system in Las Vegas, and a move to Purdue made sense for everyone. Honestly, it was less surprising that Purdue hired Odom, and more that Odom was willing to come to Purdue.

Of the four, Frost is probably the one who makes the least sense. He bailed on UCF to head home to Nebraska in 2017, taking over the program he once played for. But things went poorly, to say the least; Frost was unable to halt the Cornhuskers' slide to irrelevance, going 16-31 in just over four seasons at the helm. Out of the four, he's the only one who failed to find success at his most recent stop, so why did UCF hire him?

My best guess is that athletic director Terry Mohajir is trying to recapture the magic of Frost's previous stint in Orlando, when the Knights showed a real knack for finding talent in Florida and built themselves into a member of college football's nouveau riche, banging on the doors of the establishment and demanding to be let into the country club. Whether or not Frost can accomplish the feat again in the NIL era, and from a position in the much tougher Big 12, remains to be seen.

Which brings us to Rodriguez, who might be the most fascinating of the four coaches here. He left the Mountaineers in 2007 to take over at Michigan, where things did not go to plan at all and he was fired after just three seasons at the helm. From there, he jumped to Arizona, where results were decidedly mixed; he had just one losing season with the Wildcats but only won 10 or more games once in five years, a 10-4 campaign that saw Arizona get curb stomped by Oregon. His offenses in Tuscon put up points, but couldn't stop anyone, so he was shown the door.

From there, Rodriguez pinged around the college football landscape, spending a couple years at Ole Miss, a year at Hawaii as an analyst, and a season at Louisiana-Monroe as offensive coordinator. From there he landed at Jacksonville State, guiding the Jaguars to three straight nine-win seasons between FCS and FBS.

Much like North Carolina, West Virginia find themselves in a weird place as a program. The fan base expects a certain level of success, as well as a particular style of play, and when they don't get it, they turn on coaches in a hurry. But they've struggled to find any kind of consistent success since joining the Big 12, cracking 10 wins just once in 12 years and frequently sitting between five and eight wins. On top of that, their NIL situation is less than ideal, a fact which will make it harder to compete, and makes top-tier assistant coaches approach with caution.

Faced with flagging enthusiasm, Rodriguez was a logical choice; large swathes of the Mountaineer fan base still love their old coach, and think he's the missing ingredient to getting them back to being world-beaters again. On top of that, Rodriguez has shown himself capable of maximizing limited resources in the modern game, albeit at a much lower level of football than West Virginia is currently at. He'd energize the fan base, has proven he can win here before, and has shown he can win with less resources than other programs have. What's not to like?

Ultimately, while each program had their own reasons for making the hires they did, they also had their hands forced somewhat by their situations. None of these programs are traditional powerhouses, none of them have fully armed and operations NIL machines (UCF might be the exception to that rule, but they're apparently doing their own thing), and all of them are going to take a considerable amount of effort to build into a consistent winner. None of these jobs, not even North Carolina, were going to land a top-tier assistant coach, so why not run it back and try to find success?

Now, the only question that remains is whether Rodriguez or Frost can re-kindle their teams' fortunes; whether Odom and Belichick can prove themselves capable on a second run. The landscape is drastically different than when they were last in the Power Four (or in Belichick's case, it's a drastically different situation than the NFL), have they learned from their mistakes, or are they doomed to repeat them?

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With Rich Rodriguez reportedly heading back to West Virginia, why has 2024 become the year of the retread coach?

By Sam Westmoreland | 7:41 PM EST