Neal Brown Talks Signing Day, Quality of 2021 Class, Remaining Needs

West Virginia head coach Neal Brown wraps up the first day of the early signing period.

Christopher Hall | Dec 16, 2020

The early signing period of college football for the 2021 recruiting class began Wednesday morning. West Virginia come into the day with 16 commits under their belt, and by the time head coach Neal Brown took to the podium in the early afternoon, 14 had sent in their national letter of intent.

The only two that had not sent in their NLI were running backs Justin Johnson Jr and Jaylen Anderson, although Johnson became official shortly after the press conference ended and Anderson committed this Wednesday evening.

“Today is a culmination of a lot of hard work and a lot of time put in, invested by a lot of different people,” said Brown. “This class really started in January of 2019 when we first got here as a staff. Proud of every one in this organization – it takes everybody for making this group come together. Small class today but high-quality class. Very diverse group from different areas which I think speaks to the power of the West Virginia brand and our logo.”

Later adding, “I’m so proud of the group we got. I think if you look at quality – some of the recruiting services want to add all your signees, so you get credit for the more signees you sign, and I get that, but I think there also needs to be another metric where you look at, regardless the number, what’s the overall rate of the kid you sign and I think if you do that with this group that we have, it's going to match up really favorably in our conference and across similar programs across the country.”

The coaching staff still has a handful of scholarships available to complete the 2021 class, and Neal Brown explained that this initial signing period was “intentionally small.”

“We’re still recruiting a couple of high school prospects that will sign in February, and we’ll be in the market for four-year transfers as well when the transfer rule goes into effect,” he said.

The priority in the numbers is on the line of scrimmage, an area they will always accept playmakers.

“We’re always going to try to put numbers in our offensive line and defensive line, and we’ll continue to add to those numbers as well,” said Brown. “If you look at our o-line, we added Ja’Quay Hubbard, so he was really another one during the fall, and we’ll look to add one or two more between now and next August.”

“Defensive line is, we always want to have numbers there. And then DB’s, the number of scholarship defensive backs we have is small – we’ve got to continue to grow that. We’ll probably add at least one, maybe two of those between now and August as well.

“The one area that we haven’t addressed that we do have on our roster is at linebacker, and we hope to do that over the next couple of months.

“We got to continue to build offensive line-wise, for sure. We got to continue to improve and make strides on the offensive line. We’ll never turn down a playmaker at wideout.

“The key area need is at linebacker both at the high school and probably at the transfer route as well. And then we got to continue to build our depth at the defensive back position.

“We’ll never turn down a true playmaker at the defensive line either.”

West Virginia Class of 2021 Signees

CB Andrew Wilson-Lamp

ATH Davis Mallinger

RB Justin Johnson Jr

QB Will Crowder