Neal Brown Has One Burning Question: "What's the Plan If We Don't Play?"
West Virginia University Football held its first practice of fall camp Monday morning. Head coach Neal Brown addressed the media following the morning activities early that afternoon, and while a decision looms on whether or not there will be a college football season, Neal Brown has a question.
"What's the plan if we don't play? Everybody is talking about 'hey, we got to make these decisions.' I just want to know what the plan is if we don't play," said Brown. "How do we handle these 100-student-athletes that I have, and that all these Power Five schools and all these Group of Five schools have – like, how do we handle that?
"The reason I ask is, we broke out of here in March and all sports ended. And, nobody really had a plan because we didn't see this coming. We didn't have time to plan. And so, before we make a decision about, 'are we going to play or not going to play,' and if we make that decision, which I'm against, but if we make that decision, then we got to have a clear plan on how we're going to move forward in this semester with these guys, and it can't be, 'hey, we're not playing. Oh, I don't know - I don't know.' That doesn't work. They're tired of that. They're tired of 'I don't know's.' So, let's make decisions, and let's go about it."
Brown believes with the current protocols and continuing to gather more information on safely operating a program during the pandemic; college football can have a season. He also feels, like many others, that the players will be better off playing football than not.
"We respect the virus, my question is, and I know medical experts that have to look at this from the medical point of view, and I get it. It's serious. It's a novel virus which means its new," said Brown.
"We don't know the long-term effects. We continue to garner information. I will say this, our return to play policies include echocardiograms, they include cardio MRI's – all those types of things. Those high blood issues that have been talked about, ours includes that. We are going through every medical procedure our medical team advises us.
"There's a long process to get back on the field, and I'm for that, but we're not talking about the collateral damage there is for young people when something they love is taken away from them, and that structure and that discipline is taken away from them.
"So, you take them out of their athletics – you take them out of the structure – you take them out of what they really love, what happens? Because I've seen it. When they were not here for three months, I've seen it within our team. I think that's something that needs to go into it when the decision-makers are making the decision - they got to think about the collateral damage as well."
The Big 12 Conference Board of Directors is supposed to meet Tuesday night to discuss the upcoming season.
