Brown irked by Big 12 poll that has WVU last
MORGANTOWN — We will begin today with a bit of a guessing game for you.
After all, at Big 12 Media Day, isn’t everything a guessing game? So, we would ask you to name which conference coach over the two-run that ended Thursday uttered the following statement, disguised only so that it doesn’t become obvious who was speaking:
“I love what we bring back on the offensive line,” this coach told the media, noting that a couple of his linemen were young and one a freshman All-American. “We’re bringing back all five starting offensive linemen. We’ve recruited the position well over the last two years and it’s a highly competitive room.”
Then, when noted that a strong offensive line wins championships, this coach said “I’m with you, man. You win football games up front, and you’ve got to recruit big humans to make that happen, and that’s something we’ve committed ourselves to doing over the last two years, and we’ll continue to commit ourselves to.”
OK, your guess?
Now, as much as you’ve heard how the strength of this season’s West Virginia football team — that’s picked to finish a distant last in the Big 12 — is it’s offensive line, and really its lifeline to a successful offensive season, you probably are thinking that was a point Neal Brown was stressing when he took to the speaker’s chair.
You’d be wrong.
Oh, Brown heaped praise on his O-line, but the above comments came from Steve Sarkisian, the coach of the Texas Longhorns, picked to win the conference in their final year before heading for the SEC.
We bring this up only to emphasize Brown would seem to be on the right track toward building his team with his emphasis on an offensive line and a running game this year; a running game led by a player he dubbed “a budding superstar” in CJ Donaldson.
As it turns out, Brown understands he’s walking a tightrope as he enters his fifth season as WVU coach, and he has set it up so that things will be different this season, both offensively and defensively.
Whether they will be different enough to save his job and produce a winning season against one of the nation’s toughest schedules that would upset the Big 12 apple cart remains to be seen. But rest assured if it doesn’t, Brown can’t say it wasn’t for a lack of analyzing what was wrong and doing what he could to correct it.
First of all, Brown left no doubt that he believes this is a better team than the conference’s media does, that group having ruined Brown’s vacation by putting them last.
“I do not agree with that,” Brown said, but he did find something good about it.
“The good thing, the positive is that the media has not been, as far as predicting the Big 12 goes, very successful in recent years, so I think that bodes well for us,” Brown said, only half seriously.
“But I’ll say this on a more serious note,” he went on. “I was sitting on the beach last week when Mike Montoro (the WVU football sports information guru) sent me a text and I made the mistake of looking at it.
“From that point on, my vacation was over. I went into football mode.”
He even laid it out before his players as soon as he could.
“I think in this day and age of media information being able to ignore anything,” he explained. “I think your best option is just to confront it. We had a team meeting on Tuesday where we talked about it in detail, and probably in more colorful terms that I did here, but I said a lot of the same things to our team.
“I have a strong belief, and what we spend a lot of time on, is just talking about being who we are. We have a clear vision of what we have to improve on.”
The offensive line gives them an anchor when they have the ball, but they feel they need to be more efficient, make fewer mistakes, that the offense with an athletic quarterback capable of evading a rush, running the ball and throwing gives them a different look and, with added speed on the outside, a chance to make explosive plays.
“I’m excited about what we’re going to look like. We’re going to be more athletic at the quarterback position. I expect you’ll see some ground and pound next season,” he said.
The real rebuild, though, comes on defense.
There was a time when, in the Big 12, all you tried to do was outscore the other team. No more.
“You’ve got to be able to defend the pass,” Brown said when asked how important that has been with two past champions, Baylor and Kansas State.
“If you go back and look at us, we played really good defense for three years. In 2020 we played great defense,” he said.
They addressed the secondary strongly in the portal.
“One of the things, after you reflect back, is we knew we needed to get some veterans, so we went out and added Montre Miller from Kent State, who started double-digit games at corner, was an All-MAC player, and added Anthony Wilson, who’s started over 30 games and was a three-time All-Sun Belt player at Georgia Southern and brought in Beanie Bishop, who played at two previous institutions with double-digit starts.”
They put in some new concepts and created a new game plan to improve the play on defense.
“What we have done is simplified,” Brown said. “We have stressed fundamentals and I think we will be a much better tackling team this year and, from a cover standpoint we have gone back and started from scratch.”
This isn’t a matter of hoping it works.
It has to work.