Tuesday marked the first day of full padded practice. The first five practices were just shorts and sometimes shoulder pads, but practice No. 6 was the time for the players to show off how physical and tough they are. Rich Rodriguez had been waiting for the moment, but it didn’t go as planned.

When full pads are applied, usually there is the sound of clashing or grunting, but Rodriguez didn’t hear any of that. He yelled, blew his whistle, and had enough of the “softness.” Rodriguez wrapped up practice, making the team run for the last 10-15 minutes.

“There are way too many moments of softness,” Rodriguez said. “I think sometimes, it’s not everybody all the time, and it’s not the same guy all the time, but it can’t ever be allowed. Sometimes our guys don’t even realize that they’re being soft. I don’t want to say it’s in their DNA. It’s just their version of going hard, and ours hasn’t quite measured up all the time.”

Rodriguez said they weren’t fully tackling, but it just didn’t look like full-contact football. As a coach, it was the type of football that made you want to throw up.

“There should be some collisions, or some sounds of collisions up front,” Rodriguez said. “O-line, D-line, sometimes look like they’re tango dancing instead of playing football. I didn’t eat a big breakfast, that’s good, because there’s certain things that might make you lose your breakfast.”

A little under a week ago, Rodriguez went on a “rant” about how players aren’t as tough as they were when he first started playing or coaching over two decades ago. Tuesday, after another rough practice, he brought it up again about how players are different.

Rodriguez, who walked on to West Virginia in 1981, said he walked to practice from the residence halls and back three times a day, because that’s when teams were allowed to practice more than once. There weren’t as many injuries because players were in shape.

“We didn’t need cars, because we were in shape,” Rodriguez said. “I would have taken a ride, but we weren’t allowed to take a ride.”

Rodriguez said all the mistakes are mental, because realistically, everything goes back to your mindset. Sometimes a player messes up a route because they didn’t break hard enough, or they’re not hustling back to the line to run the next play. Rodriguez said he can only yell and blow the whistle so much, attempting to get them into shape.

Their mind just isn’t always on football.

“I think it’s just commonplace for guys to think more about other stuff than football,” Rodriguez said. “Well, there should be nothing else on their mind during football camp than football. They’re going home, and I don’t know what these guys are doing. They get a couple of hours. They got a couple of hours this afternoon. They’re probably going home and watching somebody dance in their tights on TikTok in their locker room, or they’re watching SpongeBob SquarePants. They might be playing video game football. Maybe they got the closest thing to watching football.”

Rodriguez agreed that cell phones might make it harder to keep their mind straight, and back in the day, of course, there weren’t cell phones when he played.

He’s still an advocate that all his players should have access to the necessities, like training, food and an ice cream machine, but he just wants to make sure they are trying their hardest on the field.

Rodriguez brought up former WVU punter Pat McAfee and talked about how hard he works nowadays and how his time under Rodriguez could’ve helped his career.

“I do think part of our responsibility is to teach our guys to get up, put a great day’s work in, and maybe, I don’t know if you’re going to outwork your opponent, because everybody works hard, but have a sense of appreciation for their opportunity and work really, really hard to make the most of it,” Rodriguez said. “Then, when they graduate or move on, or whatever career they’re going to have, they’re going to outwork somebody in the same field so they can have success. That’s kind of a pipe dream. But I also think there are some realistic goals with that.”

West Virginia will return to shorts on Wednesday and then back in full pads on Thursday, leading up to the scrimmage on Saturday. Now that Rodriguez chewed his team out and made them run, he hopes they’ll have more intensity the next time they put full pads on.

“We can’t make the same mistakes tomorrow as we did today,” Rodriguez said. “Some of the things that are egregious, like in the football sense, not in life sense, but some things that are egregious in the football sense, we’ve really got to make a point out of everybody’s got to understand that part.”