So you think you can dance?
Not in West Virginia’s locker room. At least not on camera.
Mountaineers coach Rich Rodriguez told reporters on Monday he banned his team from filming and posting themselves dancing on TikTok.
“We try to have a hard edge, whatever. And you’re in there in your tights, dancing on TikTok. It ain’t quite the image of our program I want,” Rodriguez said in response to a question about whether or not he had a social media policy in his program.
Rodriguez said he wasn’t banning players from the platform; he was just banning them from dancing on it.
“Anything that doesn’t look like our program should look. It’s like, come on. Really? I’m allowed to do that, I guess. Twenty years from now if they want to be sitting in their pajamas in the basement eatin’ Cheetos and watching TikTok or whatever the hell they can go at it. Smokin’ cannabis or whatever? Knock yourself out,” Rodriguez said. “Hopefully the focus can be on winning football games. How about let’s win the football game and not worry about winning the TikTok.”
Rodriguez is in his second stint as Mountaineers head coach, returning to the program in December after going 60-26 in seven seasons at his alma mater and the flagship school in his home state from 2001-07 before taking the head coaching job at Michigan.
West Virginia began spring practice this week.
“Everything today is about trying to make everybody individual. It’s all about the individual. Football is one of the last things that has to be more about the team than the individual,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez isn’t the only coach not crazy about his team cutting footloose in the locker room.
Earlier this spring, Nebraska coach Matt Rhule instructed his strength staff to do a punishment workout after discovering dozens of his players were on TikTok and had filmed videos around the facility, which Rhule said was a “hard no.”
“They were pushing plates with their bios and all their cool stuff they love to post on there,” Rhule told the “Pat McAfee Show” last month. “But they were doing wall sits at the end, and every freshman had to get out and do a 10-second TikTok dance while the rest of the guys did the wall sit. Welcome to old school.”
Required reading
(Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
