There's a version of this story that plays out slowly. A head coach gets word that a trusted assistant, a man he coached as a teenager and personally brought back to the building, has been arrested. He asks for time. He talks about gathering facts, about respecting a process, about not rushing to judgment. Days pass, and a statement finally arrives, hedged and lawyered, only after the media has been asking for it long enough to be embarrassing.
That is not what happened at West Virginia this week, and the difference is worth sitting with.
Noel Devine was arrested Sunday on a charge of felony strangulation, one day after the Mountaineers beat UT Martin 52-7 to move to 2-0. He was booked into the North Central Regional Jail, with bail set at $40,000, and he has pleaded not guilty ahead of a preliminary hearing scheduled for Sept. 23. Those details, and the allegations behind them, are serious. They're also, at this stage, allegations in a charging document that hasn't been tested in a courtroom. Devine is entitled to that process. Nothing here presumes how it ends.
But Rich Rodriguez's job on Sunday wasn't to decide a criminal case. It was to decide, immediately, whether a man facing that charge should keep coaching young players and representing the program while it plays out. He answered that question the same day.
"Upon receiving information of the arrest, I have immediately and indefinitely put Noel Devine on leave from the Mountaineer football coaching staff," Rodriguez said in a statement Sunday. "Any future decision on his status will be determined after more information becomes available."
That statement carries more weight once you know the relationship. Devine wasn't some analyst Rodriguez inherited or barely knew. He played for Rodriguez back in 2007, in Rodriguez's first stint at WVU, before Rodriguez left for Michigan. He became a program legend in Morgantown, sitting third in school history with 4,315 rushing yards and holding the all-purpose yardage record at 5,761 yards, with a WVU Sports Hall of Fame induction in 2021 to go with it. When Rodriguez came back to Morgantown in January 2025, he hand-picked Devine to join his staff as an assistant running backs coach and offensive analyst. This is a man Rodriguez helped raise as a football player and then chose, as an adult, to work beside every day.
Every one of those ties is a reason to stall. Loyalty is the most human excuse in coaching, and it's precisely the excuse that lets abusers keep their access. The people most inclined to give a coach the benefit of the doubt are the ones who love him. Rodriguez had every emotional reason to hope there was more to the story, to protect someone who once carried his offense as a freshman. He didn't let any of that buy Devine even a single afternoon of ambiguity.
I want to be precise about what I'm praising here, because the honest version of this argument matters more than the flattering one. Rodriguez didn't fire Devine. He suspended him indefinitely, and his own words left the door open: any future decision comes "after more information becomes available." That's not a promise of permanent separation, and it shouldn't be dressed up as one. What earns the praise is the speed and clarity of the leave decision. No caveats, no "we're monitoring the situation," no waiting to see how the news cycle broke. The default was removal, and the burden now sits on new information to change that, not the other way around.
That framing is the standard, and it's a low bar that too many programs still trip over. The instinct, when the accused is beloved and useful, is to keep him in the building and quietly hope it goes away. Rodriguez inverted it. He treated a felony strangulation charge as disqualifying from active duty on day one and made reinstatement the thing that has to be justified later. That's how it should work everywhere, and the fact that it required no visible internal debate at WVU is the part other schools should study.
I won't pretend there's a clean rival case to hold up next to this one for contrast. I'm not going to invent a foil to make Rodriguez look better than he already does. The point stands on its own. When the accused is a stranger, a fast response is easy. When the accused is a man you recruited, coached, and hired twice, it's a test. Rodriguez passed the part he could control, on the timeline he controlled.
The rest is out of his hands. WVU plays No. 25 Virginia on Sept. 19 in Charlotte's Duke's Mayo Classic, and if the case runs long, the program will have to sort out an offensive staff without Devine while Big 12 games arrive. That's a real logistical problem, but a minor one, and Rodriguez has already shown he's willing to eat the inconvenience rather than dodge the decision. The preliminary hearing on Sept. 23 will start telling us more about the case itself. Until then, the only judgment available is on how the head coach responded to the news, and on that question, he got it right.
