West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez patrols the sideline during the Mountaineers’ 49-0 loss to Texas Tech Saturday. (Photo by David Pennock)

Texas Tech stomped West Virginia. There were multiple ways to describe it, but all of them would be different ways of saying the two schools are just in two different leagues. The Red Raiders beat the Mountaineers 49-0 in one of the most lopsided losses in WVU history.

Texas Tech, top to bottom, is a better and more talented football team than WVU. That’s why the Red Raiders will play in the Big 12 Championship game next week, and why the Mountaineers played their final game Saturday afternoon. WVU’s roster can’t compete with Texas Tech, and it showed.

“I would say that even if we won the game, we got to get bigger, faster, stronger, more athletic,” Rich Rodriguez said. “Then, we got to coach them up. Now it’s glaringly showing up that we’ve got to do that.”

WVU had a chance to be competitive coming into the game, with the positive momentum it showed in the last four games, beating Houston and Colorado, and playing Arizona State close. The Mountaineers were quickly brought back to Earth.

Rodriguez is once again evaluating everything.

“I’ll evaluate everything as I always do, and I’ll fix our problems,” Rodriguez said. “Some of them can be fixed pretty quickly. Some of them may take a little time, but I know what they are.”

Rodriguez talked about fixing the problems multiple times during his nine-minute postgame press conference, but other than getting bigger, faster and stronger, he didn’t name them.

There are glaring issues like the offensive line, the tackling, and the defense giving up big plays. Those issues had persisted all season long and were completely exposed against the Red Raiders.

“I know how to fix our problems, and it’s painful to do it, but we’ll do it,” Rodriguez said. “Our problems just didn’t arise this week. It’s been there all season, so I’ll know what we need to do and how we got to go about doing it, and that process will be tough.”

How does Rodriguez plan on fixing the talent problem? It won’t be adding 81-plus transfers like he did last year. Rodriguez plans to attack high school and junior college recruiting hard, which, over the years, will make the problems go away.

WVU already has one of its best recruiting classes in the modern era, and just recently scored four-star Kevin Brown, who chose WVU over Ohio State and North Carolina. Rodriguez plans to sign 33 commits this cycle. Most of them will sign starting on Dec. 3.

“I’m really excited about our recruiting class,” Rodriguez said. “I’m not saying that because I’m up here and we got our tails kicked by them. I think we’ll sign maybe 40 high school, junior college guys next week. We’ll get us a dozen or so out of the portal. Fix our problems. We’ll get some young guys here in our program to get bigger, faster, stronger in the weight room.”

The only problem is that trying to rebuild a program through high school recruiting takes time. The 33 recruits aren’t all going to be instant impact players, and most won’t even play. It’ll take some time to get them ready for the next level.

In this new era of college football, fans and athletic departments don’t have patience. Multiple head coaches have been hired after not having success. It’ll be interesting to see how much time fans and AD Wren Baker give Rodriguez to make WVU compete for championships again.

After a 4-8 season, fans are already unhappy.

“I’ll fix it,” Rodriguez said. “I’ll fix some other issues, I think we may have. Nobody likes this, least of all me. This is not good, but it ain’t gonna stay like this forever. Like I said, some of the problems are going to be a little harder to fix, but we’ll fix it.”