WVU coach Neal Brown on being picked last in Big 12: 'We won't finish there'

Neal Brown didn’t even wait for the question to be asked.

During his opening remarks at Big 12 football media days Thursday, the West Virginia coach immediately stared down the elephant in the room – the fact that his Mountaineers had been picked, in a preseason vote of media members, dead last in the conference.

“Looking forward to proving everybody wrong on that front,” Brown said. “We won’t finish there.”

WVU didn’t end up last in the poll for no reason.

While going 5-7 last season, the Mountaineers gave up 32.9 points per game, second worst in the Big 12. There’s also uncertainty at quarterback with junior Garrett Greene and redshirt freshman Nicco Marchiol competing to replace JT Daniels, who transferred to Rice.

The schedule does WVU no favors. The nonconference slate starts with a visit to Penn State before home games against Duquesne and Pitt, and the conference schedule includes road trips to TCU and Oklahoma.

Brown is 22-25 since taking over in Morgantown – the worst four-year stretch for WVU since the late 1970s – and his job security probably rests on how quickly the Mountaineers improve.

Still, Brown professed relentless optimism, running down a laundry list of reasons why the Mountaineers will make those needed improvements.

He started by noting the way WVU finished last year.

“We beat Oklahoma, beat Oklahoma State on the road, winning two of our last three games,” Brown said.

He moved on to the offensive line. The Mountaineers return four starters, including preseason all-conference selection Zach Frazier.

“We have 132 starts returning on the offensive line – 132. If that’s not the most in the country, it’s got to be close,” Brown said. “Within that group, we’ve got four former freshman All-Americans. We’ve got three for-sure all-conference type players.”

Running behind that line will be 6-foot-2, 239-pound sophomore CJ Donaldson, who ran for 526 yards with a 6.0 yards-per-carry average last season. Brown called him a budding superstar.

“Offensively, we’ve got to get better efficiency-wise, especially on first down and in the red zone,” Brown said. “We’ve got to be more explosive and eliminate errors.”

As for the defense, Brown suggested WVU will be “one of the most improved units in the Big 12, if not in the country,” and that improvement will come because of the team has “all-league type players at each level” – Sean Martin at defensive end, Lee Kpogba at linebacker and Aubrey Burks at safety.

“Defensively … we’ve got to limit the explosive plays,” Brown said. “You’re going to give up some, especially in the league that we play in, but we have to limit those explosive plays. And then we’ve got to be able to create takeaways. The explosive plays and the lack of takeaways last year were the biggest negative effect on us defensively.”

Much as he did during his media day address, Brown didn’t tiptoe around the preseason projections for his team when talking with players.

He didn’t want them to ignore the negative press clippings.

“I think we’re past, in this day and age with media information, being able to ignore anything. I think your best opportunity is just to confront it,” Brown said. “We had a team meeting on Tuesday where we talked about it in detail, and probably more colorful terms than I just did here, but a lot of the same things that I said to our team, I just repeated here in front of you all.

“I have a strong belief, and what we spend a lot of time on is just talking about being what we are. We have a clear vision of what we have to improve on.

“This is something that’s going to increase the size of the chip. The chip was already there on the shoulder. It just increases the size.”