Neal Brown Gives His Opinion on What Football May Look Like in 2020

After missing spring practice and possibly summer workouts, what will college football look like? Neal Brown gives his thoughts

Outside of the Big 12 Conference suspending team activities through May 31 due to COVID-19, there is no timetable on when the West Virginia Mountaineer football team resume preparing for the 2020 season.

West Virginia head coach Neal Brown and his staff only got two of their allotted 15 spring practices before the entire sports world shut down. Some teams had already gotten their practices in and some had none. Nonetheless, the majority of college football teams were just getting started.

This is a valuable time for football programs around the country. It’s a period for installing plays - getting the timing down in all phases of the game and, as always, fundamentals. So, without this phase of the offseason and assuming the season starts on time, what will college football look like?

“The quick answer is, I don’t know because we’ve never had to do this before,” said Brown. The biggest thing you’re losing on this is just repetition.”

“Let’s assume that everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to, and I think that would be off, but let’s assume all these players that play division one football are doing what they’re supposed to and they’re doing the workouts and they’re sleeping and they’re eating and let's say they’re doing all those things leading into the season. The biggest thing you can’t make up is the timing of the plays you get in the spring, those repetitions that you’ve logged.”

“And then, even without coaches, the stuff that the kids do on their own in the summer, those repetitions," continued Brown. "You don’t get those back. So, I think early in the season, the product – I don’t know if your regular fan will be able to tell as much, but I think the product would maybe be as clean. I think as you get to the mid part of the season I don’t think you’ll see much fall off. I think what you’ll see also is probably programs being a little more basic because you don’t have time to teach and rep the things you normally would.”

The start of football season is generally sloppy, usually filled with penalties, but it may look a little uglier, with a little more turnovers, and may take a little longer for teams to hit on all cylinders. 

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