MORGANTOWN — In the midst of a three-game losing streak during a season that has not lived up to expectations, it’s safe to say there is some negativity surrounding the WVU football team.
That negativity is circulating through the fanbase and can be found in abundance on social media, but if head coach Neal Brown has his way, it will not penetrate the walls of the Milan Puskar Center.
“I just think there are a lot more things out there people have to be down about,” Brown said during his weekly press conference Tuesday. “So when I come into this building, I refuse to be negative, I refuse anybody in here to feel sorry for ourselves as coaches or as players.”
As the Mountaineers sit at 3-6 with a 1-5 conference record, it’s not that Brown is pretending everything is fine, more that he would rather focus on the present than dwell on the past.
“The way I look at it is this, football problems are better than 99.9% of other people’s problems, so I’m not going to get too hung up on them,” Brown said. “I hate it because the investment level is high and when things don’t go the way you want them to go, that’s disappointing. But you always have next.”
Next in this instance is a noon kickoff against the Oklahoma Sooners (5-4, 2-4) Saturday at Mountaineer Field. The potential to be the first WVU team to defeat the Sooners as a member of the Big 12 is enough to get the team motivated, according to Brown.
“This week, the thing that’s great and the reason why I really believe our guys are excited is because it’s Oklahoma,” he said. “This team has the opportunity to be the first one to win since joining the Big 12, so I think that is added incentive.”
Brown’s staunch focus on the present does not mean losing does not affect him. If fact, as Brown tells it, he can brush off any negativity on social media and even the calls for his firing, but it’s the losing that gets to him.
“I hate losing. Losing makes everything difficult to deal with,” Brown said. “I hate it because people in this building are investing a lot, I hate it because I really haven’t had to experience that very often. What people say doesn’t necessarily affect me, but the losing is painful to go through.”
Brown said he can handle most anything he sees on social media, and he’s not shy about talking to his team or his family about how to deal with it. He admits that it is fair for fans to be disappointed in the team this season, but he also knows that wins, losses and sentiments shared on social media are not reflective of the kind of person he, or anyone in the program, is.
“That’s a real conversation you have,” Brown said. “What I try to relay to my daughters and my wife, and I talk to our players about this, they’re not attacking you personally. Even though they may ‘at’ you and it’s your name and your Twitter account, it’s not personal.
“If you allow that to be personal, that’s on you, that’s on me. Most people, and I would say almost all people, that are doing that type of activity on social media don’t know you. They don’t know me and so it would be foolish of me to take that personally and it would be foolish of our players to take that personally. What it is, is they’re not pleased with our product, which is fair.”
The way to disperse that negativity? Simply play better.
“I just kind of get lost in the work,” Brown said. “I think failure is temporary unless you accept it and I refuse to accept it.
“The bottom line is, we’re going to do everything we can to prepare to win a game this week. We’ve got to do everything within our powers, as the head coach or coordinators, all the whole way down our staff, to the players.”
It’s not blind hope for Brown, it’s a real belief that his team is good enough to play with, and beat, anyone in the Big 12.
“I think we’re capable, and we’ve shown that we’re capable, of playing good football,” Brown said. “We’ve lost some close games and so I don’t think anybody that’s in our program has lost vision of the fact that we can compete and beat anybody in our league. That’s the positive.”
As much as he refuses to dwell on the past, Brown is equally against getting caught up thinking about the future.
“All you do is focus on the week at hand,” Brown said. “It’s natural tendency to start worrying about what’s next, but you’re doing yourself a really big injustice. You’ve got to be where your feet are and really worry about the here and now and that’s what we’re doing. We’ll worry about the long-term things and future years at the end. Right now, it’s about we’ve got to find a way to beat Oklahoma.
“We’re going to play an entertaining brand of football on Saturday. Everybody in this building is working their ass off to put a win up…We’re not looking at it as three games, we’re looking at it as one.”
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