FARMINGTON, W.Va. -- Before he put the pedal to the metal of college football, Rich Rodriguez jammed brakes.

Before he taught coaching clinics on spread-offense nuances, the one-back running game and the protection schemes used by anybody from purported-genius Urban Meyer to Jason White-quarterbacked Oklahoma, he taught driver's education at his alma mater to teens consolidated from five mining-area schools in the patches that the locals call coal camps.

North Marion High. Second floor, Room 230. Thirty-three miles southwest of Mountaineer Field.

Not that Rodriguez let his students take the car that far.

"There were two students I wouldn't even get out of the parking lot with; I worried for the people of Marion County," he recalled. "You know the extra brake those cars have? I wore that one out."

That was a stop-start 1989, when he was, in the parlance of today, between head-coaching jobs. He steered Salem University for one season, 14 true freshmen and a 24-year-old coach infusing hope for better times, then the football program was dropped.

So he headed back to Morgantown and the coach for whom he toiled as a nickel defensive back, West Virginia University's Don Nehlen, to serve as a volunteer assistant. He left his apartment at 5:30 a.m. each weekday to go to his other alma mater, North Marion High (Class of 1981), for early morning bus duty and a couple of driver's ed spins along either windy Route 250 or the school's blacktop lot.

It's a long way from there to the BCS, to a Sugar Bowl date next Monday with Georgia, to a fifth year with a Mountaineers program that this season crested under him to 10-1 and a No. 11 ranking, to being both Big East Conference Coach of the Year and heralded as the Modern Master of the Spread Offense.

But that year away from a head-coaching job, fueled by his own competitive fires and a burning ambition to return to the soft-bituminous soil from whence he came, all conspired to drive Rodriguez. His next step was the head job at Glenville State College.

"We built the protection game at Glenville that everybody in the country runs now," Mike Springston said last week, speaking from experience because he was there, the offensive coordinator off whom Rodriguez daily bounced offensive ideas as if they were competing at tennis. "The dive option. The speed option. The mid-line option. It's all the same school of thought, but you'd never dream if you came to Glenville it would start there. ...

"I can't say enough about what Rich has done with the running game. That has been the dynamic separator."

And the technique of the tackle reading his block on the option play, perfected amid Rodriguez's Tulane days, was to Springston -- a veteran Division I-A assistant and Division II head coach -- the most "revolutionary" change in college football the past decade.

Northwestern learned its spread offense -- plays, formations, terms, signals, everything -- from Rodriguez at Clemson. Meyer, who turned his Bowling Green and Utah success into wealth at Florida ("He didn't send me any bonus money," said Rodriguez, 42, in jest), once sent his entire Bowling Green staff south to the feet of the young wonder. Shoot, this Grant Town, W.Va., guy might well find traces of his system anywhere from California to Florida.

A West Virginia vein

Before he helped to re-grip the wheel, if not re-invent it, he always had a ball in hand. Has been that way "as long as I can remember standing up," he said. As a tot, he used to toss a football atop the family's house and catch it rolling off, until his mother, Arleen, finally bellowed, "What's that pounding on the roof?"

Competitive? He hated to lose at everything, building the biggest jump for sled-riding and winning most frays on the family ping-pong/pool table set and playing pickup football or basketball until dark to make sure he won. "Rich will race you to the water fountain," said Wake Forest defensive coordinator and former Glenville State aide Dean Hood.

Dale Sparks, Associated Press
West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez reacts on the sidelines in a win against Maryland this season.
Click photo for larger image.Matt Freed, Post-Gazette
Rich Rodriguez enjoys his team's crucial, triple-overtime, 46-44 victory against Louisville this year.
Click photo for larger image.Rich Rodriguez fails to catch a pass in a high school game against Lincoln. Nevertheless, he received an honorable-mention berth on the Big Ten Conference's all-league team. Photo from the 1980 North Marion High School yearbook.
Click photo for larger image.

Brothers Steve, 11 months older, and Kenny, six years younger, learned to stoke those fires. Games on the family grass basketball court were brutal, with Rich winning regularly. Kenny maintains that if there were a 3-point line in 1980 and 1981 Rich would've played Division I basketball instead of football.

Such competitiveness translated into the hallways of his school, where he was class salutatorian. He became student council sergeant at arms, Varsity Club treasurer, Key Club junior director. Nobody else in North Marion's inaugural year was pictured more often in the North Star inaugural 1980 yearbook than Rodriguez' 13 times.

All three Rodriguez boys were born in Chicago, Arleen's hometown, but raised mostly in the next county south of Morgantown's Monongalia, in the mining patch that was home to father Vince and grandfather Marion Rodriguez, who immigrated from Spain as a boy. Vince, like his three brothers who reside on the same Grant Town lane, worked the mines. Those holes in the ground were motivating factors to Vince's boys, the father once turning out the mine lights to convince scared Steve that college was the better route.

Eastern Federal No. 1 closed about the time Rich was in high school, causing a robust town to dwindle eventually from 30 taverns and a couple of thousand miners to its present 725 souls and nary an open store. Through it all, this middle son always figured a ball of some sort would lead him on life's journey out of the place they pronounce as the holler.

A 1981 all-star football game convinced him to walk on with the Mountaineers, with whom home state lads must prove their Division I-A mettle. "Every drill was like the last rep of his life," recalled teammate and later graduate assistant David Johnson, who now coaches tight ends at Sugar Bowl-foe Georgia. "High energy. Had the passion." In his sophomore year, he mapped it out: broadcasting or coaching.

"I thought in coaching, you could have a little better impact and influence," said Rodriguez, who was a backup defensive back, intercepting a critical pass in the 1984 upset of Penn State and attending four bowls in his playing career. "But it wasn't an easy start."

After a 1985 season toiling as a student coach under Nehlen, he got an assistant's post at Salem (W.Va.) College. Rodriguez ascended to head coach in his third year, at age 24. Then, two weeks before his wedding, on a June 19, 1989 date he'll never forget, his athletic director walked into his office and informed him of an afternoon announcement "detrimental" to his program. As in: It's over, son.

He had just purchased a $33,000 home in Clarksburg, his first new car and a future with his fiancee, Rita, a Jane Lew, W.Va., native and former Mountaineers cheerleader. After the wedding, they got an apartment in Morgantown, where he commuted between being the driver's ed instructor and a volunteer coach.

"I told him, 'You got the best job in the freaking county, teaching driver's ed. And you want to leave?' " fellow teacher Brad Butcher remembered. After barely one semester, Rodriguez found that way out. Butcher berated the move: Nobody goes to Glenville State. Rodriguez's response: I've got to get out of here.

Coup de 'Ville

"That," Rodriguez said, "was a godsend."

Better put, it was a learning laboratory. Glenville State was an NAIA program whose football team scored 20 points the season before he arrived in 1990, so the new kid coach could've tried anything. And he did.

Basically, he watched tapes to learn the Mouse Davis Run and Shoot, the Red Gun version used with the Houston Oilers by Jack Pardee -- who once had Davis as his offensive coordinator -- and Davis' original flavor with the Detroit Lions. Nonetheless, Glenville went 1-7-1 that first season, although Rodriguez swears they received standing ovations for first downs. Rodriguez pushed Dean Hood from offensive to defensive coordinator ("thank God, he didn't fire me") and hired Springston from West Virginia Tech, to whom, Hood said, "we lost by a thousand."

Springston and Rodriguez were the mad scientists. The Run and Shoot, which Springston learned after a 31/2-hour discussion with Davis at a Pittsburgh coaches clinic and picked up variations from little Lamar and Tennessee-Martin, was their chemical. Glenville was their gurgling, bubbling beaker. For much of that breakthrough 1991, one would barge into the other's tiny office with ideas: no-huddle, shotgun, two-back, one-back, this, that. Their tight end got hurt, so they added a receiver to provide them a four-wide set.

"We worked at this thing and kicked at each other," Springston said.

"When you're at a small school and there aren't many folks who come to the games, and most of those are related to you, so you could experiment a lot," Rodriguez said. "Every year since then, we've kind of tinkered with it a little bit."

A new spread offense was created. OK, so it exploded on them at times: 4-5-1 that 1991 season, when Springston left to pursue head-coaching jobs, and 5-4 in 1992. Yet they were attracting eyes and players to a nowhere school, a program where they taped the players and washed the laundry and had bake sales ...

Hood remembers Rodriguez once grabbing the school van, buying a hunk of bologna and two loaves of bread and some drinks, and the two of them taking off for a Florida recruiting expedition. They slept overnight in the van, in rest areas. "I think we signed seven kids on that trip, in the school van eating bologna all week. It was beautiful," Hood said.

"I don't know if he recruited me or I recruited him," recalled Tony Gibson, a player and assistant still under Rodriguez. Gibson also saw first hand the fruition of the screaming, cajoling, preaching. "He always told us, 'Those who come here will be champions.' He told us, and it happened."

That fourth season, 1993, Glenville beat mighty Central State of Ohio, starring future NFLer Hugh Douglas, among others, in the NAIA semifinals. It lost in a championship-game shootout the next week. Yet it made a name for itself and its 30-year-old coach.

The team went 8-2, 8-3 and 6-4, still Rodriguez couldn't land the Fairmont State coaching job up Paw Paw Creek from Grant Town. "California, Pa., opened up, and he couldn't even get an interview," Hood said. "We thought we were going to coach Glenville until we were 90 and die there ... that they'd put statues of us out front."

Bowden family ties

Before he became part of a driving force in college football, Rodriguez was driving to Alabama football camps to try to recruit stray Southern players. These weren't just any camps, either. These were the Bowden Academy clinics, run by Florida State's Bobby (formerly of the Mountaineers) plus sons Terry (formerly of Salem) and Tommy.

Academy counselors got room and board, T-shirts and, if they were good, $100. "The objective for the Bowden Academy is to make the Bowdens some money," Tommy said, "but Rich always got paid."

The guy from Glenville State, a place the Bowdens could appreciate, impressed them with his work with kid quarterbacks. Added Tommy: "The yelling. The intensity. He got your attention pretty quick."

From Samford's campus in Birmingham to Auburn, Rodriguez kept coming back each June, bringing Hood, Gibson, anybody who wanted to join him. Eventually, in 1997, when Tommy Bowden was named Tulane's head coach, the Bowden family punched the ticket that Fairmont State or California couldn't: Rodriguez was going big time, the new Green Wave boss offering free rein of the offense as incentive to join him.

Hello, quarterback Shaun King, an offensive spread in the controlled clime of the Superdome, 26 school offensive records. Tulane went 7-4 and 12-0, and Tommy went to Clemson in 2000.

Rodriguez, the logical Tulane replacement, felt school officials insinuated that he should hire a baby-sitter for his two children and bring Rita to a news conference ... where homegrown Chris Scelfo was announced as the new coach. It was a body blow. "People say it's worked out for the best," he said. "At the time, you didn't think that."

He followed his Tulane boss to Clemson, where they set 69 school offensive records. Another opportunity knocked: Texas Tech. Under Texas state law, the job had to be posted and remain vacant for 10 working days before it could officially be offered. Yet that fortnight afforded him the chance to call Nehlen and a bunch of other coaching and AD acquaintances. In the end, he decided to decline Texas Tech's offer and see if Nehlen might retire soon. It was a dicey move.

Lo and behold, Nov. 26, 2000, scarcely 50 weeks later, Rodriguez came home again.

"That's a native thing," said Steve Harold, his former Glenville assistant and his replacement as athletic director. "If you can coach your home state university, it means even more."

With that spread offense, the Mountaineers went 3-8 his first season. The record improved to 9-4, 8-5 and 8-4 with consecutive Gator Bowls and Big East title shares, but there remained grumbling in the Mountaineer State about the three consecutive losses to end last season and the passing-challenged offense.

Now this.

A 10-1 season in his fifth year, his first with an almost fully Rodriguez-recruited roster and a run-run offense. An outright Big East title that West Virginia last claimed in 1993, when it last reached the Sugar Bowl. A team with shimmering prospects, given the underclassmen backfield of sophomore fullback Owen Schmitt, freshman tailback Steve Slaton and redshirt freshman quarterback Pat White, the wheels that make this offense go. Twelve starters return next season, along with 14 other underclassmen who started at least one game this fall.

"I can see his coaching, and his philosophy of the way he lives his life, in this team," said Johnson, the ex-teammate and current Georgia assistant. "It's very evident in the way they play football."

Truth be told, Rodriguez still screams. He still sends players onto the field with the same "Strap It On" speech he gave at Glenville. The former Superstars-style competition at Glenville, where players swam relay races wearing a sweater that they handed off to the next guy, where they thrived in tobacco-spitting and egg-eating and arm-wrestling and slam-dunk contests? It continues each February as the Mountaineer Olympics -- minus the spitting, of course, what with West Virginia attempting to raze stereotypes.

"The biggest difference is now I have a lot of help," Rodriguez said. "I don't have to wash the clothes. I don't have to line the field. My wife doesn't have to put the logo in the middle of the field."

Brother Steve added: "He's worked hard. He's put in some long hours. That's typical Rich. That's the I'm-not-going-to-lose factor."

Junior Rich Rodriguez displays his poster in the main hall for student elections in a photo from the 1980 North Marion High School yearbook.
Click photo for larger image.

First Published: December 26, 2005, 5:00 a.m.