Neal Brown is Cautious of Being 'Overly Critical' of Brandon Yates

WVU head coach Neal Brown is hoping for cleaner snaps this week versus Kansas State.

Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

West Virginia's offense had a difficult time getting into a rhythm in last week's loss to Iowa State after the first drive of the game, part of which was impacted by the poor snaps from center Brandon Yates.

Of course, the game wasn't determined by the sixth-year senior's rough day at the office, but it certainly didn't help the cause. WVU head coach Neal Brown talked about Yates' issues in his postgame press conference, on Monday's presser, and then once again during his radio show at Kegler's on Thursday night.

Being critical of Yates

“First of all, it’s a tough job. I don’t know if you truly appreciate how hard it is to snap and do that unless you’ve done it. If you think about it, I would encourage anybody that’s been overly critical to kneel down, put your head between your legs, and snap the ball. And oh, by the way, as you’re doing that, either run off the ball or set back against somebody that’s really really good and probably and NFL player. It’s really hard.

What led to the several bad snaps

"He had an injury so we had to change some grip things during the week. We really didn’t have those issues during the week with the snap issues, but we did in the game. It adds a degree of difficulty for the quarterback…we had eleven (bad) snaps in the game and five of them were real critical and negative plays. When you only run 64 and 11 of them don’t have the best opportunity from the start, it’s hard. I think you’ve got to be careful of being overly critical as a coach to a center. It’s like a quarterback, you kind of have to be careful with that because you don’t want them thinking about it. You want it to be a natural movement.

How it's looking in practice this week

"We’ve corrected some things. We’ve done some different things with his grip this week and he’s snapped the ball well. Now, he’s got to do it in the game and we fully believe he will.”

My two cents:

To some degree, I agree that you have to be careful with yanking a center. It is something that can very easily be damaged if you pull him, but at the same time, you have to worry about the game that's right in front of you. Now, there's no guarantee that redshirt freshman Landen Livingston would have come in and played a flawless game, but it couldn't have been worse, right?

The most damning thing about it is the coaches knew about this during the week and after the first five or six poor snaps, decided to stick with him. At some point, you have to be willing to take the risk and make the change. No one said it had to be permanent, but on that night in particular, WVU needed cleaner snaps.

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