MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia began its third week of preseason practice Monday with a full-squad workout.
The Mountaineers were coming off an 88-play, two-hour scrimmage inside Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday.
It was just the second time since March 12 that coach Neal Brown had his entire squad together, and it was the first live tackling for the Mountaineers since the TCU game back in November.
“I wasn’t excited about how our defense finished the scrimmage on Saturday,” Brown said Monday . “They got off to a good start, but didn’t finish at all and then offensively, we did some good things in the second half after watching it a couple of times on tape.”
On Monday, Brown said the focus was on situational work. They did some two-minute, end-of-the-half scenarios, red zone and fundamental stuff. He said they also concentrated on tempo — getting the units on and off the field quickly.
“Defensively, we didn’t get lined up well on Saturday so we worked a lot on that. That was much improved,” he said. “Today, really the defense dominated. It was as much of a dominant practice as I’ve been a part of in a long, long time. I don’t know if the offense won a single period. There were periods of practice when the offense didn’t win a single play.”
Brown said he will have to watch the tape to determine if it was great defense or poor offense.
“I’m not sure we blocked Darius Stills all day,” he said. “I thought he was extremely active. I thought we ran to the football better on defense.
“Offensively, it was very disappointing,” he added. “I didn’t think there was a whole lot of competing going on. The passing game with the receivers and quarterbacks was really non-existent all day.”
Brown also liked the way the secondary competed during team situations.
“I thought our defensive guys really bounced back and competed today. They owned their mistakes and came out and made corrections, and our guys on the back end really competed,” he said. “I think they had multiple interceptions. A couple of them they just took away from the wide receivers. Our defensive backs had more fire than our receivers did.”
Consequently, Monday’s practice standouts were all on the defensive side of the ball, according to Brown.
The coach mentioned the play of Stills and Jeffery Pooler Jr. on the defensive line, linebacker Josh Chandler-Semedo and defensive backs Dreshun Miller, Tae Mayo, Tykee Smith and Sean Mahone.
West Virginia is scheduled to have another morning workout today and then will hit the pause button for on-field activities Wednesday, as WVU begins classes for the fall semester.
“It’s going to be more of a physical type of practice (Tuesday),” Brown noted. “We are going to do some situations involving running the football. From today until next Tuesday is critical to our development.”
The rest of the week includes another practice Thursday, a scrimmage Friday night inside the stadium and a light practice Saturday before taking Sunday off.
Brown had indicated that this will be an important week of improvement for his team before it begins preparing for its season opener against Eastern Kentucky on Sept. 12.
“Even though classes start on Wednesday, we are going to stay in camp mode until next Tuesday,” he concluded.
