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Moving Mountaineers: Baker hoping West Virginia finishes strong this season

West Virginia Athletic Director Wren Baker welcomes Rich Rodriguez back to the university. (Photo by Damian Phillips/BlueGoldNews.com)

MORGANTOWN — Fans on the Caperton Trail have high expectations for West Virginia’s 2025 season, FanDuel doesn’t have any faith, and experts think the same. All those expectations and goals for Rich Rodriguez’s first year back don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Athletic director Wren Baker’s expectation is really the only one that matters because he writes the checks and can fire the head coach.

Baker doesn’t have an expectation for this year’s team, in terms of making the Big 12 Championship, winning a bowl game, or finishing above .500.

“If you go back in my history, I don’t think I’ve ever put an expectation out there in terms of wins and losses,” Baker said. “Especially for a first-year head coach.”

To credit Baker’s decision, the 2025 squad is hard to place expectations on. There’s no named starting quarterback, 70-plus transfers, a new staff and head coach. There are also really no set starters. No one knows how good WVU will be in 2025.

“I wish I could sit here and say I know where we’re at right now,” Baker said. “With 75 new players, I don’t know that anybody knows, right? I think that’s probably a record number of new players. I don’t know if there’s ever been somebody with more new ones. I think the job of our entire coaching staff is to very quickly analyze each of their skill sets, acclimate them to the culture, fit those pieces together in a way that allows you to have success. That’s been an awfully big job. I think they’ve worked really, really hard at it.”

However, Baker does have a metric to decide whether the season was successful. WVU could get off to a rough start, but he wants the program to finish strong, building towards 2026 and beyond.

“I think what you’re looking for is for the coach to come in and establish a culture, come in and build a foundation, and then when you get to the end of year one, you feel like you got momentum going into year two,” Baker said.

With the return of Rodriguez, there’s always going to be expectations from fans, who expect him to bring the program back to greatness. Especially since Rodriguez already left a bad taste in the fandom’s mouth when he abruptly left in 2007.

The sourness was something Baker considered when he hired Rodriguez. The backlash was always going to be there, and Rodriguez said the athletic department was a little concerned about how it would go over. It was off to a rough start when protestors made a small scene at Rodriguez’s introductory presser, but he shook it off.

Baker’s not concerned about what happened almost 20 years ago. Over his career, Baker received emails from fans wanting him to fire a coach, and then the next week, the coach beats a ranked opponent. Then, the fans want to extend the coach. It’s always all over the place.

Baker thought Rodriguez was the best hire to create a successful program.

“My job is to focus on the here and now in the future,” Baker said. “Regardless of it being the coach’s second tenure here, or how the first tenure ended and how people feel about it, the evaluation for me is still the same. Do we feel like we’re laying a foundation, that the coach is building a culture, and that we have something to build on for the future? I’m pretty good about shutting out the outside noise, because I always know that that’s temporary.”

In the morning, when Baker drives over to the parking lot of the Milan Puskar practice facility, the lot is filled with cars. Baker once again drives over at dark, and the cars are still there. In the eight months since Rodriguez was hired, Baker feels pretty good about the trajectory of the program, without seeing the team actually play, yet.

“It’s been fun to work with Coach Rodriguez,” Baker said. “It’s been fun to watch him. He’s very calculated in just about everything that he does when he’s with his team. I’m confident where we are going.”

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