Brown鈥檚 鈥榬eboot鈥� has WVU on upward swing
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Let’s be honest. Two years ago you didn’t think Neal Brown would be coaching West Virginia’s football team into 2024.
Not really sure he believed he would.
Certainly, the main subject of discussion in barrooms and on the Internet across West Virginia when football was brought up was Brown’s fate and it spread into the national media and as 2023 dawned, people were convinced enough that things were so wrong in Morgantown that the team was picked last in the Big 12.
But Brown didn’t just cuss his luck, although you know he could have.
Everything had been working against him from the start. He knew he’d inherited a mess from Dana Holgorsen and one year into his reign he was assured of that as his initial team was unable to conjure up any of the images he had of a good football team. Then Covid hit him with all the fury of a JJ Watt blitz.
He knew something had to change and, as he looked in that mirror, he saw it was himself.
The 2022 season was the turning point in Brown’s program.
“The way I look at it is after the season in ’22, when I felt like we underachieved, I just hit the reset button on a lot of it,” Brown admitted. “I probably didn’t have a six-year plan when I got here, as far as what I’d think about what we’d look like going into year six in the spring, but what I can say is after ’22 when things didn’t go the way I thought they should, or we didn’t play as well in any phase as I thought we were capable of, so we underachieved, we just changed a lot of what we were doing.”
Things could not have been much worse. WVU was in the final stages of losing its third straight game in a season that would end at 5-7. J.T. Daniels, who was brought in to ignite the offense, had struggled through his worst game, WVU heading into its final possession owning just 3 total yards in the second half.
Brown brought Garrett Greene into the game and he led them to a 75-yard touchdown drive.
The torch had been lit and the next week, for the first time since joining the Big 12, WVU beat Oklahoma behind Greene.
Brown looks at it as if he were a bowler in a bowling alley and that he just hit the reset button.
“There was just a big reset in our program, so now what I think of is, ‘All right, we are in month 16 of the reboot, and we’re making progress.’ I can’t sit here and tell you in the spring, but I will be able to tell you after three or four games in the fall. We are kind of into the second year of our reboot,” he said.
“There’s a lot of things off the field, but from a simple football point we want to be a team that is disciplined, strains, is tough and is smart.”
There is one commonality in all those characteristics, Brown pointed out.
“All those traits take absolutely no talent,” he said.
All the film watched, all the testing, all the skill drills …. they are one thing, but Brown has always used a holistic approach to creating a football team — and a football player — so he went beyond the traditional aspects to create a culture in which the team and player could operate.
He built not only strength and speed and agility in the weight room, but a comradeship that allowed the growth in those areas to reach maximum level. He worked on character and pride in one’s self, one’s team and one’s state as well as one’s state of mind.
This was a complete makeover and with Greene inserted into the starting quarterback position — a man who exhibited all four of the areas he wanted stressed — the push for the qualities would come from within the locker room rather than from the coaching staff.
“What we do is we have things we do in our winter program through spring ball, summer, fall camp and into the season that we are working on Tuesdays and Thursdays that we are working on identity of who we have to be to be successful,” he explained. “That’s being disciplined. It’s straining. It’s being tough — that’s mental and physical toughness — and it’s being smart.
“We’ve taken this 12-month approach of who we are from a football identity standpoint, and I think we are beginning to see some of the fruits of our labors,” he added.
The example Brown gave as to how it is working is that the team’s tackling had improved.
It almost had to, as bad as it was at its worst.
“We are tackling much better in the spring. Well, we are in month 16 of a total revamp of how we’ve taught tackling, how we’ve worked it and it’s been a year-round approach from even going back into the winter of how Mike (Joseph) and the strength and conditioning staff have worked angles, deceleration and things like that.
“So, we are showing signs that we are becoming a much better tackling team, which goes under physical toughness,” he said. “We work it. We talk a lot about striking with your hands. That’s a part of physical toughness. Well, we’ve worked that in the weight room on these strike pads that we have. We do grip training. We are still a work in progress of the identity that we need to be.
“I’m pleased with where we are at 16 months into it, but we have not arrived,” he added.
Not everyone is convinced. They note that last year’s 9-3 record was built against a weak schedule that included only two ranked teams, both of whom — Penn State and Oklahoma – beat WVU handily, by a combined 97-35 margin.
So Brown understands that there is much room for improvement but, at the same time, he knows but for a Hail Mary pass he could have had a 10-win season, indicating that the reboot has put the team heading in the right direction.
Certainly, athletic director Wren Baker believes so, having given Brown a one-year extension on his contract, showing the state that the administration was behind him and expects them to remain on the up escalator through the next few years.