West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez listens to a question during the Big 12 NCAA college football media day Wednesday in Frisco, Texas. (AP Photo)

MORGANTOWN — Rich Rodriguez admits his return to West Virginia to coach the Mountaineers has him “feeling a little bit like Forrest Gump” he told the assembled media on hand as he opened the second of the Big 12 Media Days in Frisco, Texas.

“It’s been 17 years,” he reminded them, and every now and then we all need to be reminded just how long Rodriguez’s banishment lasted. “I’ve been in the desert, in the Bayou and all over the place. But I’m back home now.”

That he passed over his term in “The Big House” — not jail, although it had to feel like it at times, but the nickname that has been bestowed over the years on the stadium at Michigan — could not avoid being noticed, for that was his first stop after he escaped angry crowds following his final game at WVU, that dastardly defeat to rival Pitt.

So his transition back to WVU has been easy.

“Typically, it takes you six to nine months to get accustomed to the new town. It took me about six to nine minutes,” Rodriguez joked. “We got a couple of new traffic circles in town and I had to figure that out, but outside of that it was an easy transition.”

Rodriguez may come to a time in mid-camp when he feels like he’s caught up in one of those traffic circles as he tries to work out his quarterback situation.

“It’s always the position you should worry about the most, because it is the most important position in football,” Rodriguez emphasized. “You got no chance to win if that guy’s not pretty good.”

But Rodriguez feels confident he has a room where a competent quarterback will emerge.

“That’s the room I’m probably the least worried about from an athletic and a talent standpoint,” Rodriguez said.

“I’ve got three guys who have played, a couple good young players. So we have talent there, but they have to learn our system and get better individually.

“It’s going to be a fun competition. I’m hoping I have three I can win with, and I think we do. If I have two we can win with, I’ll play them both. If I have three, I’ll play all three.”

The leading candidate heading into summer camp is left-handed Neal Brown-holdover Nicco Marchiol, whose dedication alone ought to earn some points. He has been brought along slowly, and while he hasn’t earned his number being retired yet for sure, he has one number that really matters and that is a 3-0 record as a starter.

He is not the typical Rodriguez dual purpose QB, but runs well enough.

And his biggest challenge figures to come from a dual purpose quarterback transfer from Texas A&M in Jaylen Henderson while Max Brown, a transfer from Florida through Charlotte, will make it a camp where anything can happen.

“Now, they’ve got to learn our system. They’ve obviously got to get better individually, with what they can do, but we’ve got the pieces around them, as well.

Rodriguez was a step away from being on top of the world then and ever since he’s been a football nomad, going to a lot of different places like Arizona and Louisiana and Jacksonville State in Alabama before he returned to Morgantown to attempt to complete what he had started oh so long ago.

“A lot of our staff has been together for a long time, so we all come back and it’s good to come back to a place where we know we can win, but also it’s home to us,” he said.

While there are some familiar faces on the coaching staff like Pat White and Rasheed Marshall and Noel Devine, faces covered by helmets and face masks are quite unfamiliar to the Mountaineer fans … and the coaches, for that matter.

“Half of them weren’t here in the spring. You get a little bit of knowledge during summer workouts, but August camp is so important. “You have to make sure the culture is right. That’s first and foremost,” Rodriguez said.

Ah, culture. Sounds simple enough, especially for Rodriguez, who every three or four years has been going through the same routine in a different place. But it isn’t.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Rodriguez admits. “It’s not just because kids are different today. That’s not it. It’s there is so much going on in their lives. People ask, ‘Can you coach hard now that they’re getting paid?’ Hell, you can coach them harder. They have more at stake. They want to get value.

“It used to be you would say to them that you were going to make them get more valuable so they could play at the next level. Now you can get more value just for next year here or next week. It’s a different dynamic.”

Rodriguez admits he may be intrinsically old world, but says he doesn’t approach it that way.

“I may be old school but I’m also thinking, ‘What does today’s world look like to these guys?’ What can we do now to motivate them at their highest level? I still think that’s our greatest responsibility as a coach; to take them somewhere where they can’t take themselves.

“That’s what coaching is all about.”