MORGANTOWN – Let’s be honest. Two years ago, Neil Brown would have never thought he would be coaching West Virginia's football team until 2024.
I'm not sure I believed he would do that.
Indeed, Brown's fate was the main topic of conversation when football came up in barrooms across West Virginia and on the Internet, and as it spread to national media and 2023 dawned, people began to wonder what was going on in Morgantown. I was fully convinced that I was very wrong. The team was picked last in the Big 12.
But Brown didn't just curse his luck.
Everything was against him from the beginning. He knows that he inherited a mess from Dana Holgorsen, and after a year of his reign, it was difficult for him to do so, as the first team failed to conjure up any of the image of a good football team that he had. I was sure of that. Then the coronavirus hit him like a JJ Watt electric shock.
He knew something had to change, and when he looked in the mirror he realized it was himself.
The 2022 season marked a turning point for Brown's program.
“In my opinion, after the '22 season, when we felt like we weren't achieving, we just hit the reset button in a lot of areas,” Brown said. “When I came here, I probably didn’t have a six-year plan. As far as thinking about going into my sixth year in the spring, all I can say is that from ’22 onwards, things aren’t going the way I thought they would. We didn't get there because things didn't go the way we planned, we didn't play as well as we thought we could in every situation, and we just changed a lot of what we were doing.
Things couldn't have gotten any worse. WVU was on the tail end of a three-game losing streak in a season that ended at 5-7. Quarterback JT Daniels, brought in to spark the offense, struggled in his worst game, and WVU totaled just three yards in the second half heading into its final possession.
Brown brought Garrett Green into the game and led him to a 75-yard touchdown drive.
The torch was lit, and the following week, WVU followed Green by defeating Oklahoma for the first time since joining the Big 12.
Brown looks at it as if he was a bowler at a bowling alley and just hit the reset button.
“We just had a big reset in our program, so now we're like, 'Okay, we're 16 months into the restart and we're making progress.'” What do we sit here and tell the spring? I can't, but I'll probably be able to say after three or four games in the fall. We're just entering the second year of the reboot,” he said.
“There's a lot going on off the field, but from a simple football standpoint, we want to be a disciplined, tense, tough and smart team.”
All of these traits have something in common, Brown says.
“All these traits require no talent at all,” he said.
We watched all the movies, did all the tests, did all the skill drills. These are the things he does for one thing, but Brown has always created his football teams, and football players, using a holistic approach. Therefore, he created a culture in which the team and players could operate beyond the traditional aspects.
Not only did he build strength, speed, and agility in the weight room, he also built a camaraderie that allowed him to reach maximum levels of growth in those areas. He also worked on his character and pride in himself, his team, his condition, and his state of mind.
This is a complete makeover, and with Green, who has demonstrated all four areas of emphasis, stepping into the starting quarterback position, the push for those qualities will come from within the locker room rather than from the coaching staff. right.
“What we do is what we do in the winter program through spring baseball, summer and fall camps, and we work on Tuesdays and Thursdays to get ready for the season and figure out what we need to do to be successful. “It's about working on your identity,” he said. “It's about being disciplined. It's about being nervous. It's about being tough, it's about being mentally and physically tough, and it's about being smart.
“We've been approaching who we are in terms of our football identity over the last 12 months and I think we're starting to see some of the fruits of our labor,” he said.
An example Brown gave of how it was working was the team's improved tackling.
As bad as it was, it almost had to be.
“We're working much better going into the spring. Now, we're in the 16th month of completely overhauling how we teach and approach tackling, and that's a lot of work with Mike (Joseph) and his strength. We have taken a year-round approach to training, even going back to the winter.The conditioning staff has been working on things like angle and deceleration.
“So we're showing signs of becoming a better tackling team, even under the physical toughness,” he said. “We do it. We talk a lot about hitting with our hands. It's part of physical strength. Well, we do it in the weight room and these strikes that we have. We did that with pads. We're doing grip training. We're still in the process of finding our identity.
“We're happy with where we are now, 16 months later, but we're not there yet,” he added.
Not everyone is convinced. They remember how last year's 9-3 record was built on a weak schedule featuring only two ranked teams. Both teams, Penn State and Oklahoma, easily defeated WVU by a combined margin of 97-35.
So while Brown knows there's a lot of room for improvement, he also knows he could have won 10 games last season barring the Hail Mary pass, and the restart will help move his team in the right direction. It shows that
Certainly, athletic director Len Baker believes so, giving Brown a one-year extension in the hope that he will show the administration has his back and continue riding the upward escalator for years to come. It was shown that
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