Amid Crisis, West Virginia and Neal Brown Using Culture to Win in Recruiting
It's hard to quantify how much the world has changed in recent weeks. If things haven't stopped altogether, they've slowed precipitously. Restaurants have all but gone dark, highways are empty and many, many people are hurting financially. It's not the first time the nation and the world at large has experienced uncertainty. During those times, people, luckily, were buoyed by sacred outlets like art, music, film and sports. While Netflix and Amazon Prime are humming with record levels of traffic, our fields, arenas and courts are strangely quiet.
Even for the Nick Saban's and Dabo Sweeney's of the world, who own championship hardware and limitless resources, this is a rough stretch. For a guy like Neal Brown, who has a single 5-7 season as a Power Five head coach to his name, it could positively apocalyptic.
West Virginia is building, perhaps perpetually. As the winningest program in Division I history without a national championship to its name, the Mountaineers have been on the cusp of greatness multiple times. After an ultra-promising 2018 team led by Heisman-hopeful Will Grier fell short and the roster, along with Dana Holgorsen's staff, were largely disbanded, it's fallen on Brown to make short work of building a coal-bred machine capable of winning a Big 12 crown.
Since Brown arrived on campus in the spring of 2019, he's been working at a yeoman's pace to strengthen West Virginia's new brand dubbed #TrustTheClimb. Outside of the fact that it's fitting for a team that makes its home in the hills of north-central West Virginia, it has, more importantly, taken root on social media. You won't see a tweet or an Instagram story or a video upload of a coach or player without the program slogan tattooed on it emphatically. It's not just an empty canticle, either. While clever slogans are a dime a dozen in the digital world, there seems something powerful pushing this West Virginia re-brand forward.
Look at Brown's latest recruiting haul, for example.
Since the beginning of the postponement of college athletics, the Mountaineers have received verbal commitments from Alabama's top-rated quarterback Will "Goose Crowder", 3-star Ohio defensive end Hammond Russell and consensus 4-star running back Jaylen Anderson. Crowder, in particular, could be viewed as an absolutely massive pull in the months to come as his recruitment was starting to heat up with home state Auburn sizing him up for an offer in addition to Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt having already pulled the trigger on the Gardendale, AL product. Russell, like Crowder, was seeing his star rise in the recruiting circuits when he pledged to West Virginia over a slew of Power Five offers including Michigan State, Pitt, Georgia Tech, Minnesota and Purdue. They're the newest- and certainly not the last - additions to a growing class that already features and All-American and top-ranked player in West Virginia (Wyatt Millum, who turned down both Georgia and Alabama) and an elite receiver (Andrew Wilson-Lamp, who spurned Penn State, Wisconsin and Iowa State, among others.)
Then, mere hours ago, West Virginia tacked on a verbal pledge from coveted 4-star running back Jaylen Anderson, one of the highest-rated players in Ohio in the 2021 fast. The climb is happening and fast.
Per the 247 composite rankings, West Virginia currently boasts the nation's 17th ranked 2021 class and the 2nd best overall in the Big 12. While there are many pitched battles yet to be fought, this is already a quantum leap forward for a program that posted a losing record a season ago and, like the rest of the nation, is unsure of when it will next step on the field for even a second of live football.
So what's the secret sauce?
Eschewing any elaborate or downright ridiculous theories, I think it's simply Neal Brown's vision at work. It's been known since day one that Brown is a devil for the details and that trait, in large part, is what helped him register 30+ wins over three years at Troy, including those banner victories on the road at LSU and Nebraska. That type of success is never accidental and with the comparatively palatial resources afforded to Brown and his staff in Morgantown, it's no surprise to see that his dedication to the little things is starting to reap rewards.
And, yes- West Virginia is still fighting an uphill battle in a national arms race that revolves around facilities, equipment, amenities and marketing. Compared to a program like Oregon, whose Nike-infused team facilities look like a cross between a 23rd century star ship and a Tesla Gigafactory, West Virginia is trying to do more with shallower pockets. But given the current state of things and the suddenly level playing field across every level of the sport, all the space-age locker room space in the world can't help you. The multi-million dollar equipment rooms and training facilities sit still and empty like cutting-edge mausoleums. Without the benefit of bright, shiny things to dazzle recruits, head coaches and their scattered staff members have to lean on their most basic tools: culture and messaging.
Glimpsing at Brown and the rest of West Virginia's staff's social presence, even a casual observer can sense the unified approach at work. Not only is there a constant stream of content to chew on, it's all consistent. The head man himself is an avid contributor to the team's online footprint, reaffirming his reputation as being a present and engaged leader. Assistant coaches, whether it's Gerad Parker, Dontae Wright, Travis Trickett or Jahmile Addae, follow suit by filming family-centric workouts which touch on the broader aspects of both the game and life at home. It goes without saying that having players as active as they are on social media helps, as well. It's not just veterans, either. Just days ago, rising sophomore Winston Wright, Jr. posted a picture of himself mid-workout which prompted a number of positive responses on his physical conditioning. His response was simply to give praise to the "best strength staff in the country".
In recent video interviews, Brown has expounded on the importance of remaining accountable and maintaining order. The Accountability Teams he started this past year are still assembled and you better believe score is being kept. Recruits and players alike have been in constant contact with their assigned staff members and Brown himself has done a number virtual walk-throughs and interviews with prospects, some of whom may never camp at or set foot inside the Puskar Center before they pledge verbal intent to a college program.
Strength wizard Mike Joseph is monitoring every player's conditioning and strength regimen, improvising as much as is humanly possible in the absence of the Mountaineers' vast fitness complex. No dumbbells? Water jugs and a broom stick it is. It's an all-hands effort across the entire program to leverage the few, very powerful digital tools available to broadcast that, pandemic or no pandemic, West Virginia is up to something.
Of course, you may still be questioning what, if anything, this all amounts to. Football will resume, eventually. The lights will flicker back on and the clang of free weights along with the clack of cleats will sound off once more. Then it's back to business-as-usual, when the normal order of things will restore itself and the Disney World-like experience of touring world-class facilities will return. In the chasm between now and then, all any recruit, be it a 1-star or a 5-star prospect has to go by, is rapport. A sense of trust. A gut feeling.
There will be lots and lots of promises made during this crisis and plenty of opportunities for attention to wander. Coaches may tell a recruit anything to keep him hooked and current players, lost in this fog, might lose sight of the ultimate goal and take a step back. This will be the reality for programs without unity and core values. The pretenders will be revealed almost the instant the college football engine rumbles back to life.
Thankfully, the Neal Brown era of Mountaineers football has been building as a unified front since day one. If every Power Five program across the land is only as good as the man leading it, then the old gold and blue is sitting mighty pretty. Whatever obstacles the players under Brown's watch will have endured during unarguably the longest offseason in the history of the sport, they'll come out on the other side as strong as any in the nation. When you put culture and vision first, everything follows. When #TrustTheClimb is the lifeblood of your program, who is going to out-climb you, anyway?