Neal Brown Describes the Desire to 'Shake Things Up'
Things will look a little different when the West Virginia offense takes the field this fall. Head coach Neal Brown will no longer be handling the play-calling duties after he went out and hired former USC offensive coordinator, Graham Harrell, to the same position."
During the first three years of the Brown era, the Mountaineers have really struggled on the offensive side of the ball. Whether it be a lack of inexperience, talent, or personnel, the offense has been hard to watch at times. Following the team's miserable outing in the bowl game against Minnesota, Brown knew it was time for a change.
Earlier this week, Brown joined Anthony Treash of Pro Football Focus and talked about the decision to give up play-calling and hiring an experienced coordinator such as Harrell.
"We didn't play very well in our bowl game. We had a unique season last year. We started off 2-4 at our bye. We lost to Maryland right at the end of the game and we lost to Texas Tech and Oklahoma both on walk-off field goals. We regrouped after our bye and went 4-2 and was proud of our group, staff, players to get to a bowl game. We really fought hard and got back to a bowl game and just laid an egg. We played poorly. I knew we needed to shake things up and the world of college football has changed so much and the role of a head coach in college football has changed dramatically in the last two and a half years. I just wasn't doing a good enough job leading our offense. It didn't have anything to do with gameplanning or plays, I just didn't think I was doing a good enough job in the coordinator role of preparing our staff and preparing our players. I don't necessarily think our plays were poor or our gameplans were poor, we just needed to do a better job from a preparation standpoint. I needed to do a better job and for that to happen, we really needed to go outside. What it's done is really allowed me to invest relationship-wise in our staff more. Then from a player standpoint, it's allowed me to be much more involved with our defense. But relationship-wise with our players, it's allowed me to spend a lot more time."
The relationship part is interesting to me. Maybe Brown believes that if he is able to spend more time with his players, the transfer numbers won't be as large as they were these past two offseasons.
As far as the on-the-field stuff is concerned, Harrell's philosophy is very similar to that of Brown's with many of the same concepts. However, he knows how to generate explosive plays and play uptempo - something WVU has not had much success with in recent years. Not only was Harrell's presence needed from a play-calling standpoint, but it also helped lead to landing former Georgia QB JT Daniels.
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