Neal Brown Not Blind to WVU's Brutal Reality

"You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

This was a quote by Admiral James Stockdale that comes from the best-selling book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. WVU head coach Neal Brown shared this with his football team on Monday following the team's loss to Maryland.

Adversity is going to hit a football team throughout the duration of a season. It happens and it happens to everyone. It's about the response to adversity that really matters. After essentially handing Maryland a 30-24 win on Saturday, Neal Brown wants his guys to respond in the right manner.

"As we move forward, we've got to learn from it and grow. We didn't perform very well. We're judged on games in this business. One game won't ruin a season. Today when we get our players back together, we're going to highlight a bunch of teams that lost a game that was a 50/50 game to start and rebounded to have really good seasons. And we're going to highlight those teams that it occurred within our league and there's several you can look back at over the last four years."

Saturday's showing was unacceptable. There's no way around it. It's year three of the Neal Brown era, which means there's no more room for excuses. I went into great detail about this on my weekly Sunday Morning Thoughts column, which you can read here.

As bad as Saturday was, Brown remains committed to bringing WVU back to national relevance, and that all starts with recognizing the team's glaring flaws.

"I still have extreme faith that we're going to prevail and we're going to build a program here that's going to have a great infrastructure and be set up to win long-term. But I'm also not blind to what our brutal facts are right now and that's that we're 0-1 and we didn't play very well. Really outside of our kickoff return unit and our kickoff team, I'm not sure that we won a whole lot of battles in the game. Coaching or playing. That's kind of our brutal reality. Once you know where you are, you got to know where you want to go. Our brutal reality is that we're 0-1 in which we were soundly defeated. Offensively, we had three turnovers. We didn't play physical enough upfront. We weren't consistent enough at quarterback. Defensively, we didn't play to the standard that we've created here over the last year and a half."

West Virginia is scheduled to have two physical practices on Tuesday and Wednesday and is preparing to hone in on what the Mountaineers need to do to put a better product on the field each Saturday and it starts this week against Long Island.

"We've got our first home game with fans and it's a five o'clock kickoff which is a friendly time for our fans. It gives people time to get here and experience tailgating. I hope our fans don't give up on us after one game and I don't believe they will. I get that they're frustrated and I think our players and our staff are frustrated as well."

You can follow us for future coverage by liking us on Facebook & following us Twitter:

Facebook - @WVUonSI

Twitter - @SI_WVU and Schuyler Callihan at @Callihan_.

Add us as a preferred source on Google