MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — After his first year with the West Virginia football program, Neal Brown, an offensive guru at heart, knew he had to look in the mirror and figure out what went wrong in a 5-7 season.
The offensive numbers were far from stellar — 116th in points per game (20.6), 128th in rushing (73.3 yards per game), 54th in passing (248.7 yards per game) and 119th in total offense (321.9 yards per game).
Brown took over an offense last year that needed completely revamped with the loss of a lot of production to the NFL, but the end result was still drastically worse than what many hoped, especially in the running game.
“Anytime you don’t get the results you want, I think the first thing you’re going to do is go into self-reflection mode and ask, ‘How do we get better?’ ” Brown said. “You go out and find out how the best are doing it, and why and how. We need to make changes, but our fundamental beliefs won’t change, other than we may simplify some things we’re doing. I think we need to go back to the basics simply because last year, we may have tried to cover up some deficiencies we had, and when we did that, we got away from some things that are really important.”
The offensive coaching staff will be a big part of that, and new titles, designations and labels prove Brown is looking to make certain changes to the way the offense — behind the scenes — is run.
While Brown called the plays in 2019, offensive line coach Matt Moore and running backs coach Chad Scott were co-offensive coordinators. After the season, Moore, while keeping the offensive line job, was promoted to assistant head coach.
When wide receivers coach Xavier Dye left for South Florida, Brown took that opportunity to bolster his coaching staff in more ways than one. Brown was able to pull Gerad Parker away from Penn State to not only be the new wide receivers coach, but also named him the offensive coordinator for the Mountaineers. Parker will begin his new position on the field today when the Mountaineers open spring practice.
“Here’s the part where I needed to do a better job than I did a year ago,” Brown said. “A year ago, I felt like those guys were waiting on me a lot. Now, Gerad is leading that room, so when I’m called out to do head coaching stuff, there’s a true leader in there. There’s an offensive coordinator. He has the vision, and that’s not a knock against anything we did last year. It’s just a lot of guys were waiting on me and were not as prepared as they needed to be until probably later in the week. That’s something where as a head coach, I think you’ve got to look inward. I think you look inward before you look outward. That’s something I owned. When we had an opening on our staff offensively, that was the reason why I really felt strongly about Gerad being the right guy.”
Brown and Parker have similar upbringings in eastern Kentucky and were teammates at Kentucky in the early 2000s, both as wide receivers. After his playing days, Parker had coaching stops at UT-Martin, Marshall, Purdue, Duke and Penn State before landing his first coordinator job at West Virginia.
Although Parker and Brown were college teammates for one season with the Wildcats, it was Parker’s one year coaching high school football at Raceland High (Ky.), while Brown was an assistant at Troy, where they became close friends.
“We’re from Kentucky and we had a year crossover there, so I think a lot of people think, ‘Well, they knew each other,’ but we really didn’t build a strong relationship until the last five years, and it has kind of grown that way professionally,” Parker said. “Before then, we just kept in touch. I always admired what he had done in his career and what he had done as the offensive coordinator at Troy. When I got out of college, my first job was at Raceland High School close to home. I went to Raceland and we went down with the Tony Franklin System camps, and Neal was there at Troy when we went down to camp. I really got a chance to catch up with him there and build a strong relationship. We stayed in touch through the profession and, as fate would have it, that has led us here.”
Parker said it will be a group effort to fix the deficiencies on offense — it’s not just on him to flip a switch, and if you’re not always looking at ways to get better, than you aren’t doing your job as a coach.
“It was really just talking with coach Brown, he was right in it, and the rest of the offensive staff with an open heart,” said Parker, the only newcomer on the offensive staff. “I’ve gotten instant feedback and I didn’t really have to go to the video much. I think allowing us to be able to take a real look at it and be honest with each other, lowering our guard a little bit has allowed us to take a honest look at what we want to get better at, just as we’ll do next year. We hope our production and ability will be better, and it will be, but the biggest thing is we’ll do this every year. You better look at what you need to do better.”
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