by: Justin Walker
In a press conference on Monday, WVU Football Coach, Rich Rodriguez, was asked if he’d banned players from dancing on TikTok. The question was asked as a follow-up to comments Rodriguez had made in a previous interview.
Rodriguez said players are still allowed to use the app, but “I’m just banning them from dancing on it.”
The Mountaineer coach expanded on that by saying, “It’s like, look, we try to have a hard edge or whatever, and you’re in there in your tights dancing on TikTok ain’t quite the image of our program that I want.” Rodriguez is known for coaching his players hard and expects them to show a certain level of toughness. It’s what he calls a “hard edge.”
According to a recent article in Front Office Sports,
The move raises questions about how much control coaches may legally exercise over their players, given that U.S. labor laws examine how much “control” an employer has over a person as an indicator of employee status, two attorneys tell Front Office Sports. Over the past five years or so, the NCAA has spent millions of dollars in court and lobbying Congress trying to prevent athletes from obtaining employee status.
(Christovich, 2025)
“We are in an era where athlete personal branding has tremendous value, and restricting certain social media activities could negatively impact players’ marketability and earnings,” prominent NIL attorney Darren Heitner tells Front Office Sports. “I believe this goes beyond the establishment of reasonable team rules and further assists those claiming that there is so much control over athletes, assisting their efforts to label them as employees.”
Sports attorney Mit Winter, who was also referenced in the FOS article, shared his thoughts on X (formerly Twitter).
Rodriguez explained reasoning behind the ban. “Everything today is all about trying to make everybody individual, it’s all about the individual,” Rodriguez said. “Football is one of the last things that’s got to be more about the team than the individual.”
When asked to clarify his comments, Rich Rodriguez further elaborated on the ban with a humorous response, “I can have rules,” he said. “Twenty years from now, if they want to be sitting in their pajamas in the basement eating Cheetos and watching TikTok or whatever the hell, they can go at it, smoking cannabis, whatever. Knock yourself out.” The cannabis comment was related to a question he was asked earlier in the press conference.
So far, no reports have surfaced about any current West Virginia football player having an issue with Rodriguez’s rule.
Photo Credit: WVU Athletics
