MORGANTOWN — Neal Brown believes his West Virginia University football team has reached the pivotal moment of its fall camp, which ends on August 21 and preparation for the August 31 opening game against Penn State goes into full swing.
“This week is a big ‘prove it week’,” Brown said when he talked to his team before taking the field for the first practice since a 100-play scrimmage on Saturday. “This is the hardest week we’ll have this season. It’s the most physical week we’ll have this season and it’s to see if we can do hard things better.
“We have to prove it.”
In other words, this is the week of decision.
He ran off a list of things in rapid-fire progression that are under scrutiny during this week, things that will decide who plays and who doesn’t against Penn State, who be counted on in the clutch:
“Who can we count on?”
“Who are the newcomers that are going to play?
“Who is stepping up from a backup role and moving to the forefront?”
“Who are our go-to guys going to be? Who are calling a blitz for? Who are we calling a line movement for to create a play on the defensive line?
“Who can we count on to play some man coverage?”
“Offense, who are we going to call plays to?”
“Who are we going to go to on third down?”
“Who can we run behind?”
“Who are the leaders on the team?”
The future suddenly is now.
“We had a nice cool day today. I wish it had been 95,” Brown said. “I wish we could make it as hard as possible because that’s when the leadership shows up.”
The game is now on.
“Everyone in the country is doing the same thing. We just have to find ways to do it better,” he said.
Up to this week, it was more a learning period, installment of systems, coaches getting early looks at new players, seeing the steps forward — or back — taken by veterans in the locker room. Now, the magnifying glass comes out and under it is not only a player’s skills but his head and his heart.
The coaches will put the players under pressure.
“We put them in situations,” Brown said. “We started our team segment with the offense coming off the 4-yard line.”
See if they can dig out of the hole while the defense sees if it can pin them deep.
“It’s about putting guys in real situations and playing it, creating adversity when you don’t have any,” Brown said.
And this works best when you have competition for jobs, and players battling for playing time.
“We don’t have competition at every position, we have it at a lot of them. D-line, we feel really good about 7 or 8 guys right now. I talk to them all the time about it. This is an availability game. If you want to be counted on, you have to practice every day. The only way you are going to get better in this game is to practice. This is a practice sport,” Brown said.
“We play 12 guaranteed games. Hopefully, you can play 14 or 15 or whatever it is. We practice a lot and you have to be available to practice. You look at linebackers. We have 5 or 6 guys competing for 2 or 3 spots. In the defensive backfield, we have more players back there than we’ve ever had. Then you have the flexibility defensively that, OK, we can play three linebackers instead of playing a fifth DB …. or we can play dime and take a linebacker out.
“We can mix it up, but we will put the best players out there.”
This is the week for the best players to step up.
“Offensively, it’s the same thing. We have to figure out or are we better with two running backs in there or with two tight ends? Are we better with three receivers one back and one tight end? I think it goes back to finding the combination to play the game the way we want to play it. We want to play where we have discipline in all three phases; we want to be extremely tough, mentally and physically. We want to strain and we want to play smart football.
“None of that requires talent. So the guys that can do that, we’ll figure out how to play.”
The coaching staff doesn’t do this through guesswork. They study. It doesn’t come out of a long, hot meeting with coaches stating cases for this player or that player, this style of play, or that.
They study film daily. They put them in situations and see how they respond. The discussions are ongoing daily.
“These guys are graded from a percentage basis and production basis all the time,” Brown said. “College football is getting more like the NFL, so we have adopted that in preseason camp. Saturday’s scrimmage was preseason game No. 1. We have preseason game No. 2 coming up this Saturday. The NFL is cutting their roster. Well, we’re not cutting our roster, but we are finding out who is going to play.”
This is the approach WVU is taking on this.
“There’s not a whole lot of gray area in it,” Brown said. “Here’s what grade was from a performance standpoint …. that’s your effort, your alignment, your assignment. This is what your production looks like … and your production is based on did you make a play.”
It isn’t just yards gained or tackles made … there’s more that goes into it.
There are plays in the course of a practice — or game — when a blitz gets to the quarterback. You, as a coach, have to decide whether it was a good play by the Blitzer or did someone on the offense missed an assignment or whiffed on a block to allow it to happen. Did a pass get completed on third down because the quarterback and receiver were in sync or did a defensive back blow his coverage?
Coaches, Brown said, use experience as a guide in making some decisions, knowing what a player has done and how he will react, but you can’t just lean on experience.
“What you have to be conscious of as a coach — and I constantly think about this — is as a coach your crutch is experience. But hungry talent can overcome experience,” Brown said, noting that with a freshman or a transfer, you can’t just discount the talent they bring with them.
Sometimes things aren’t just black and white.
“Sometimes when you have a hard quarterback competition [or other close decision], you have to have a conversation. But, for the most part, this is what it looks like, this is where it’s at. Sometimes, of the 22 starting positions, you may have 3 or 4 which become tough conversations, but the way the game is played now, very few positions do you play every snap.”
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