Quick Hits: Underdog Role, Depth, Scouting Penn State + More

What WVU head coach Neal Brown had to say leading into the Penn State game.

Schuyler Callihan | Aug 26, 2024

Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

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West Virginia Mountaineers

West Virginia head football coach Neal Brown met with the media Monday afternoon to discuss the conclusion of fall camp and to preview the season opener against No. 8 Penn State. Here are the highlight's from today presser.

Facing a team with three new coordinators

“We always start from a personnel standpoint. You evaluate the personnel and the guys you think you’re going to see. Now, there’ll be some surprises as well. Some guys that made big improvements from last season or from the spring or maybe some high school players. But you look at the strengths and weaknesses of those players and then you start evaluating the schemes you could potentially see and it’s just a best guess. They don’t know what we’re going to run and all of our coordinators are back. We don’t know what they’re going to run and they’re all three new. Anytime you go into a new season things are going to be different. My best educated guess is that we’re going to see some remenence of what they used to do on special teams, offense, and defense and then some new ideas that all three coordinators bring with them from their previous stops.”

Confidence in Greene going into Penn State this year versus last year in Happy Valley

“I really felt like Garrett was prepared to take a step last year during the offseason going into the game but you don’t know until he’s the starter, he plays, and goes the whole season. So we definitely have a better feel for how he’s going to play and a lot of belief in him. I’ve said this several times, if he’s not the most underrated player in college football, he’s one of them.”

Scouting Drew Allar

“I think the quarterback probably gets too much blame and too much credit when things go good. I think more nationally than probably locally that he’s got pressure on him or that he didn’t play well. Like, if you go back and look and you think about this as a first-time starter, the kid played pretty well last year. He played really well against us, he was the difference in the game. We did okay against their run game, but he hit some explosive passes against us that really hurt us and he was really accurate with the football in our contest. We didn’t do a great job covering, but I thought he played well. A lot of people struggle against Michigan and Ohio State. If you look at his entire body of work as a first-year starter he did some really good things.”

Injury updates and depth of the team

“We stayed relatively healthy. I don’t think you know (about depth) until you play a game. There’s things I feel good about, there’s some question marks. I’m not going to share what I think the question marks are because I’d be helping them. But there’s some question marks and you don’t really know until you play. I’m eager. i’m glad we got this week to prepare. We need it. But I’m eager to see what we have. I feel really good about it, I like the leadership on our team. We’re going to have a really good football team. We’ve worked a long time to be able to peak at the right time and that’s the hope. You’re always going to have some first game jitters because you haven’t played in so long that are maybe a little different in game one, but I’m eager to see our guys compete.”

Playing the underdog role vs. Penn State

“We feel like if we play our game then we’ve got a chance to win against anybody we’re playing now. We have a ton of respect for Penn State, but we’re going to play our style of football and we’ve really been working on that for probably the last 19 months now and we feel like we’ve honed that in even more so in fall camp. We’re excited about playing. The fact that we’re underdogs…we’re going to play with a chip on our shoulder, we’re going to try to play really physical whether that’s Penn State, Albany, Pitt, Kansas, whoever we’re playing week to week. I don’t know if we have a bigger chip on our shoulder because we’re playing Penn State.”

If he’s using Penn State’s late score last year as motivation

“It is what it is. I’m not really using it. It’s just kind of is what it is. They scored late. I don’t necessarily have a problem with it, but it is what it is. Here’s the thing, if our guys need something like that to motivate them then, eh. But I will say this, the score of the game is the score of the game. We didn’t play very well. We had a chance to win the game in the third quarter when winning plays were required and we didn’t make those winning plays and they did.”