Rich Rodriguez calls for College GameDay to be at Backyard Brawl in 2025

ESPN’s College GameDay has about four months until it announces where it will be taking the show for the third weekend of the season in college football. West Virginia’s Rich Rodriguez, though, is already making the case that it should be in Morgantown for The Backyard Brawl.

Rodriguez spoke about the Mountaineers’ rivalry with Pittsburgh now that he’s their head coach again while on the ‘College GameDay Podcast’ on Wednesday. He’s ready to be back as a part of it this fall as his team will play against what he calls his least favorite four-letter word.

“I mean, it’s a great rivalry,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve always said Pitt is the worst four-letter word. I say way too many four-letter words, but Pitt is the worst one.”

“I’m anxious to do that,” Rodriguez said. “I know that’s a game – those are the games that are really easier to get your players jacked up for because they hear about it all the time, right. But, you’ve got to not just be jacked up for it. You’ve got to be prepared to play your best too. We’ve got some time for that.”

With that, Rodriguez told Rece Davis and Pete Thamel that College GameDay needed to come down that country road for the game at Milan Puskar Stadium. He’s expecting a wild crowd of Mountaineers who’ll be just as much a part of the show that morning as they will be part of the game’s atmosphere at WVU.

“It’ll be maybe the most electric atmosphere in college football that weekend. I’m hoping that we’ll have GameDay down there. That would be nice,” Rodriguez said. “I mean, they’ll put on a show. You’ll see the blue lot cranking like you’ve never seen it before and there’s, there’ll be West Virginia fans. This place will be sold out. There might be some that even go to the extreme of buying a Pitt season ticket so they can come to the West Virginia game against Pitt. We’ll see what happens with that.”

Davis and Thamel considered it as an option for them that weekend. That’s with two members of the show having ties to the state and school, including one, who previously played for Rodriguez, who might put on an all-time performance on-air if they were to be there in Pat McAfee.

“I would think one of our teammates would be pretty excited if that happened, wouldn’t you?” thought Thamel.

“Oh my goodness. Can you even imagine? That would be such a scene,” laughed Davis. “Look, we already saw what the scene was when he took his show to Morgantown. Let him take his show to Morgantown and then bring GameDay to Morgantown on the heels of that?”

College GameDay has only been to The Backyard Brawl one time. That was for the return of the series back in the opening week of 2022, in what ended up being a 38-31 win for No. 17 Pittsburgh at Acrisure Stadium after a pair of scores in the last four minutes. That included a 56-yard pick-six with just under three to play.

The Panthers have won two of the three games since the rivalry came back three years ago for the first time since 2011. That included last year’s 38-34 victory in a similar comeback fashion with two scores in the last 3:30 of the game, and lead the all-time series at 63-41 going back to 1895 with games played throughout the 1900s.

College GameDay will have some great matchups to pick from in Week 3, including a handful in the non-conference or in conference play in the SEC. That said, Rodriguez doesn’t think anywhere in the sport will be as rowdy as it’ll be at kickoff of The Backyard Brawl on September 13th.

“I don’t know who else is playing that weekend but there will not be one that’s more intense, you know what I mean,” Rodriguez said. “It’ll be quite a show.”