Neal Brown Provides Points of Emphasis Heading into Spring Practice

West Virginia head coach Neal Brown points to several areas for improvement

Morgantown, WV – The West Virginia Mountaineer football team will open spring practice on Tuesday, March 10th.

The Mountaineers are coming off a 5-7 season and missed a bowl game for the first time since 2013, but there is some optimism heading into the 2020 campaign.

West Virginia finished the final three games of the season going 2-1, including a 24-20 road win over No. 24 Kansas State in Jarret Doege’s first start at quarterback. The win kept the Mountaineers bowl hopes alive but the following week, those hopes vanished losing in their home finale to No. 22 Oklahoma State, 20-13.

West Virginia faced a desperate TCU team looking to get bowl eligible in the season finale and while the Mountaineers season was essentially over with no postseason possibilities, they showed a lot of pride fighting and clawing their way to a 20-17 victory.

Now it's back to the fundamentals as the Mountaineers aim to build on the late-season momentum and as it turns out, this is head coach Neal Brown’s favorite time of year.

“I think I said this last year, spring ball – fall camp are my favorite times of the year, just because we get to teach,” said Brown. “You’re not necessarily preparing for an opponent; you get to actually teach fundamentals and be a teacher.”

West Virginia wrapped up winter workouts Friday and Brown has liked what he’s seen.

“I like our energy. I think we’re growing in some of the key areas we were focusing on in the winter and that’s really discipline and accountability, mental toughness and the last one was competitive character. Trying to put them into as many situations as we possibly can where there’s defined winners and losers,” said Brown.

Spring football is the start of the foundation for the upcoming season and Neal Brown gave us some insight into some of the areas they’ll be focused on the 15 practices allotted.

Turnover Margin (-6)

“Offensively, we got to do a better job of throwing fewer interceptions. That’s where our issues were last year.”

“Defensively, we got to force more takeaways and then special teams, we’ve got to a better job of enforcing those same takeaways. A lot of time and effort will be invested in improving that as a whole football team.”

Red Zone (25-34, 16 touchdowns)

“Special teams, we’ve got to do a better job of making our field goals in the red zone.”

“Offensively, the focus is making sure we score touchdowns, we got to do a better job of that. That was some of our major issues a year ago.”

“Defensively, we got to try and make guys kick and then we didn’t have a single takeaway down in the deep red zone last year.”

“So, we’re going to do a lot of that. And that will start from the first day we go next Tuesday and all through 15 practices.”

On Third and Medium (3 down attempts: 62-179, 34.64 %)

“Offensively, really successful at third and short. Third and medium was a problem for us last year. Defensively the same thing.”

While Neal Brown said that those were the three main points, he added some more points of emphasis this spring.

“To another point offensively… really the major area we got to get better at is rushing the football,” said Brown. “I think we’ve got a good plan for that. Time will tell and we won’t know that until we lineup and play against Florida State, but we’ve got a plan on how we’re going to attack that.”

“Defensively, another priority is we got to do a better job of defending in minimizing big plays downfield. We did that in the run game, but we had way too many explosive pass plays last year.”

“Special teams, our punt return is something that we got to mark improvement. Last thing there is net punting (39.2).”

The Mountaineers ranked 129 nationally in rushing at 73.3 yards per game, while the defense gave up an average of 5.4 yards per play, including 11.23 yards per play to Oklahoma.