Neal Brown Ramping-up Spring Practice

West Virginia University head coach Neal Brown and his staff are preparing the Mountaineers to take the next step

West Virginia had its best record of 9-4 under head coach Neal Brown last season, a big improvement from a 5-7 mark a year prior, and the program has momentum heading into the 2024 campaign after winning five of the last six games to end the year, including capturing a victory over North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

Winter workouts wrapped up a week before spring break and according to Brown, the Mountaineers had a “productive winter,” and gave credit to the support staff.

“Really give a lot of credit to our support areas,” Brown said. “I think, as we've progressed as a program, I think one of the real strengths of what we've been able to do is in our support: strength conditioning, nutrition, sports science, recovery, athletic training, those in sports psych. Those have become real strengths of ours and over the last nine weeks, that group has really led what we've been able to do.”

Retention was a big piece to the Mountaineers’ success last year and keeping the talent on the roster and adding pieces through the transfer portal again early in the offseason, made possible by Country Roads Trust, has fans optimistic heading into the season.

“This is by far the most production we've returned, and really the most depth that we've returned without question," Brown said. “It started in January, and that's why we've really pushed. Like, we got to do hard stuff better and we've intentionally made this offseason extremely hard because the expectation levels have increased. They're going to increase outside the building, but they've also increased inside the building. And so, we got to coach these guys harder. We got to push harder stuff in front of them. So, that's kind of how we've embraced it.”

"We've got our best leadership that we've had,” Brown added. “It's been a fun group to coach. It’s a close group so far. We’ve challenged them more in this offseason than we’ve challenged any group that we’ve had. Just because, for us, it's about taking the next step. Nine wins in a bowl. How do you get that over the hump and be able to finish games where you can go play in Dallas? And that's kind of the push for us is we've got to we got to continue to get better and to get over the hump.”

The focus in the spring will be on fundamentals and competition, as it’s been during the Neal Brown era.

“What our emphasis is, really this is a teaching time for us, the spring period.” Brown added. “We haven't done a ton of football leading into spring ball and really what we want to teach is guy's how to meet, walk through and then practice as we prepare for the season.  Really, a lot of competition, especially on the special team side. We're going to do that where we divide the entire team into four groups. We’ll have four captains, and we'll do special teams competition, and then a lot of competition both positionally and then offense versus defense. This is a real focus on fundamentals. I think it made us strides last year. We've got to continue to grow. In one area we've really got to do that is from a fundamental perspective.”