MORGANTOWN — There is a lot of inexperience in WVU’s wide receiver room this spring. Both from the players and their coach.
Leading the room this season is new wide receivers coach Bilal Marshall. A graduate assistant at WVU in 2020 and 21, Marshall served as receivers coach at VMI last season before returning to WVU this winter.
“It’s been awesome, it’s like I never left,” Marshall said Saturday. “It really feels like nothing much has changed since then.”
Marshall said he considers WVU head coach Neal Brown, a college receiver, and former offensive coordinator Gerad Parker, Marshall’s college coach at Purdue, as mentors and feels that he has Brown’s trust in his new position.
“Now it’s all on you, what happens in that room,” Marshall said of being a position coach. “There’s nobody else who’s responsible for that room other than you…I know exactly what Neal wants, exactly what he’s looking for and he knows what I bring to the table. He knows what I’m teaching and he trusts me to be able to go out there and do it.”
With just one season of experience as a full-time assistant coach under his belt, Marshall has been tasked with developing a group of receivers who have even less experience than that.
“This isn’t going to be a finished product by any means in the spring,” Marshall said. “We’re just setting the building blocks for what we’re going to do in the fall. Around Sept. 2, we’ll be ready to roll.”
All four of the Mountaineers’ leading receivers from 2022 — Sam James, Bryce Ford-Wheaton, Kaden Prather and Reese Smith — left the program this offseason, leaving behind very little production. WVU’s only returning production form last season is from former junior college transfers Cortez Braham (14 catches, 147 yards) and Jeremiah Aaron (12 catches, 124 yards, one touchdown) and Preston Fox (4 catches, 41 yards).
It’s very fortunate then that WVU was able to bring in former NC State receiver Devin Carter through the transfer portal. Described as the group’s ‘natural leader’ by Marshall, Carter brings five seasons of experience with him to Morgantown, including career totals of 118 receptions, 1,906 yards and 10 touchdowns.
“I think it is crucial to have somebody who’s been a four-year starter and he knows what big-time football looks like,” Marshall said. “He’s been able to lead by example and also pull guys along. If you didn’t have somebody in that role, you’d have to build that person and create it. It does help that he’s somebody who naturally does it.”
Also transferring in this offseason was Ja’Shaun Poke, who amassed over 1,000 yards and five touchdowns in four seasons at Kent State. It’s yet unclear how much Poke, a return specialist, will be used on offense this season.
Brown thinks the biggest thing for the young receivers this offseason will simply be building confidence.
“I think in the offseason it’s about making sure they’re confident when they’re out there,” Brown said Monday. “Confidence starts by knowing what to do and that’s your alignment and assignment. The other thing this group has done a better job than any group we’ve had is the amount of balls they’ve caught in the offseason.”
Despite the tough task ahead of him, Marshall said his time with the program previously will help expedite the process.
“Coach Brown didn’t have to give me this opportunity and he did,” Marshall said. “That tells me that he trusts me and he knows what I bring to the table. I know what this responsibility means, I know what this role means to him. He’s a former wideout and he knows what he wants and I better make sure he gets exactly what he wants, and I will.”
With the Mountaineers moving towards a ground-and-pound offense this season, Marshall will only need to have three of four receivers ready to play by the time the season kicks off, instead of the five or six he’d need in an air raid scheme. Even so, Marshall knows the importance of having those guys ready.
“If we’re very run-heavy and we can’t win one-on-one on the outside guess what, we’re going to see 11 people in the box all day,” he said. “We have to make sure that we do develop wideouts on the outside that can lighten the box for our guys so we can have CJ Donaldson run the ball, we can have Tony Mathis, Jaylen Anderson, all those guys. We want to make their jobs easy because, in turn, they’re going to make our jobs easy when we start seeing one-on-one coverage.”
TWEET @CodyNespor
