What Neal Brown Said Following the Win Over UCF

The West Virginia Mountaineers (5-3. 3-2) defeated the UCF Knights (3-5, 0-5) Saturday afternoon 41-28.

Opening statement

Proud of our team, proud of our staff and when I say our team, I mean the guys that are back home, we only travel 70. The scout teams did a great job this week. All of our support staff, and it takes a village.

We had a good week of weather at home but it was in the 70s, we come down here and its in the mid 80s and that takes everybody from nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports psych the whole deal. Really proud of the team, players and staff all the way around.

We got a resilient group and if you’ve paying attention to us all year is we’ve been a group, even when bad things happen, we’ve always responded. We were really close to being a 6-1 team coming into this game and now we’re really close to being a 7-1 team but we’ve been resilient. We’ve been able to bounce back when bad things happen and I thought that was again today. We had some guys get hurt, we play two backup lineman for majority of the game. We had a couple of receivers that went down, we played a bunch of receivers in the game. Linebackers, we rotated some guys that hadn’t played before – Raliegh Collins came into play and we had a bunch of different faces on special teams but the group is really resilient.

I told them this, and I really believe this, we earned this on Tuesday and Wednesday, and we when we brought them back, we mixed up our week last week, we practiced on Sunday and when we brought them back on Tuesday morning, the group had energy, they had really good energy and I think that speaks to our leadership, again, I think it speaks leadership coach-wise on each side of the ball but we earned that. And I thought what it really came down to is our brand of football, when we’re playing well is we’re disciplined, and you can see that. We got four penalties in the game and two of them right at the end were careless. Fundamentals, and I think that shows up in time of possession offensively because we’re not doing things to hurt ourselves. We’re a team that plays really hard, and you can talk to any opposing group, we play really, really hard. We’re tough, and I already talked about the mental toughness, but we’re physically tough on both sides of the ball up front. We didn’t tackle as good as we needed to today, it was better than last week, but I thought we did a really good job of striking people.

The last thing is we played relatively smart football. Theres a couple of things that we got to get corrected. I love Garrett, there’s a couple of things he’s got to be smarter about, he’s learning but that’s who we are.

I sat here last Saturday after a disappointing loss and said the one stat that really sticks out is points off turnovers, and that’s something we’ve worked a ton. If you go back and look at who wins games in the Big 12, everybody talks about the turnover margin and that’s true but it’s really what the differential? Who scores points off turnovers and what’s that differential? And, we worked a lot of it in the spring and in fall camp and today that was the reason we won the game, and we scored 21 points off turnovers and that was the story of the game.

Beannie Bishop’s two interceptions

Beannie Biship has, outside of one game, he’s really played well for us. I think he was leading the country in pass defended, of course, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good stat, that means he dropped some interceptions, but he’s really cleaned up some of his ball skill habits… Beannie has played at a high level. He’s been around the ball a lot. It was huge, especially the first one we got because they were driving and we immediately turned it into a touchdown.

CJ Donalson’s season-high 121 yards and a touchdown

I thought this was CJ’s best game since Pitt. When he runs like that, he’s a load, and the thing today was he was so good after contact, even on that last drive.

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