After nearly two decades away from the West Virginia football program, coaching veteran Rich Rodriguez will be returning to Morgantown for the 2025 college football season in an attempt to revitalize and return the Mountaineers to the heights they last reached when Rich Rod was last at the helm in the mid-2000s. And if you’re in need of a reminder of just how high the Mountaineers climbed during Rodriguez’s tenure, just consider that Rich Rod received an offer to become the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide before Nick Saban got one.
Following an 11-2 season which culminated with Gator Bowl victory over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, Rodriguez had the chance to leave West Virginia behind to take over the head coaching job at Alabama. Instead he opted to stick around in Morgantown and coach the Mountaineers for one more season before departing for Ann Arbor only a year later to become the 18th head coach in the history of the Michigan Wolverines football program.
At the time, Rich Rod’s rationale to turn down the Alabama job, only to accept the position at Michigan one year later, did make at least a little bit of sense.
This was on the heels of a 13 year run under Lloyd Carr in which the Wolverines went 122-40. During that same decade-plus stretch, Alabama went 92-67 with five different head coaches. By no means was this the Crimson Tide program that Bear Bryant departed in the early 1980s, or even the one that Gene Stallings won a National Title with in 1992. As Florida, LSU, Georgia and Auburn all appeared to be on the come-up, Alabama was seemingly going in the opposite direction.
So all these years later, after a disastrous Michigan tenure and the rebirth of the Alabama football program under Nick Saban, does Rich Rodriguez look back on this decision with any amount of regret, or wonder whether or not he’d be the one with a statue outside of Bryant-Denny Stadium if it went the other way?
“It’d be easy to say I never thought about it, but the times when I was in between, like right after Michigan or after Arizona, it was like, ‘Jeez, did I make the right decision?’” Rodriguez told Bruce Feldman of The Athletic. “But, when you start thinking like that, you’re not being productive. But when you have idle thoughts, it’s should of, could of, or whatever. … I think everything happens for a reason.”
By no means is this thought exercise meant to suggest that had Rodriguez accepted the Alabama job in 2007, he would’ve had the same success there that Nick Saban did. There’s simply no way to know, though the thought of anyone besides Saban winning six National Titles in an 12-year span is hard to fathom. But given just how rough — and how brief — Rodriguez’s time at Michigan was, it’s certainly understandable that he’d look back on those decisions and ask ‘what if?’
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