Watching Mountaineer quarterback Garrett Greene play football evokes all sorts of different adjectives.
“Dynamic” is a favorite of WVU head coach Neal Brown. High-energy, exciting, frenetic, and fast-paced all also fit and serve to paint a picture of who Greene is on the field, — someone who plays the game with the pedal to the metal.
And yet for all the deep balls Greene throws and all the scrambles he turns into 20-plus-yard runs, you could watch every snap Greene took in 2023 and still not be able to identify one of his greatest strengths — patience.
That patience doesn’t necessarily show up on the field — he’s not going to sit in the pocket and dissect defenses like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady — rather, it’s patience that got him on the field in the first place.
“He was patient and I don’t think that gets talked about enough,” Brown said at Big 12 football media days this week. “He wasn’t a full-time starter until he was a redshirt junior … he was able to mature and learn how to play. He was able to play when he was ready.”
Greene arrived in Morgantown in 2020, but didn’t make his first career start until the end of 2022 and wasn’t the Mountaineers’ true starter until the beginning of 2023.
In years past, that wouldn’t be anything to write home about, but in the transfer portal era, the shelf life of backup quarterbacks is usually only a year or two.
Even in the four years Greene has been at WVU, the Mountaineers have had two quarterbacks come in, sit and then transfer out. Will “Goose” Crowder sat on the bench for two seasons before transferring to Troy and Sean Boyle lasted just one year before hopping in the portal this offseason.
But not Greene, who not only sat behind Jarrett Doege in 2020 and 2021, but also watched WVU bring in transfer JT Daniels to start over him in 2022.
“He’s a mature thinker and he’s got two really good parents,” Brown said. “There’s sports knowledge there and I think both his mom and his dad understood that he was a developmental player. And he did, he developed and when he was ready, he was ready and he played well for us.”
It’s important to note that Greene wasn’t exactly just sitting on the bench and twiddling his thumbs. He spent three years learning and mastering Brown’s offense so that when he finally did get his chance, he was ready.
It was actually Brown who needed an adjustment period when Greene took the reigns of the offense last season. After having pure pocket passers like Doege, Daniels and Austin Kendall, Brown needed time to learn how to best use a dual threat like Greene.
“He wasn’t forced (to play early) — sometimes quarterbacks get forced,” Brown said. “From a coaching perspective, it took me a little bit of when to let him play and not over-coach him. Let him run around and be who he is.”
And now, let’s return to Greene’s on-field play. Just because his patience isn’t evident on the field, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Greene’s style of play is indicative of a risk-taker, but there is a lot of nuance to his game.
For someone who throws it deep as much as Greene does, you’d expect him to get picked off a fair amount and yet, Greene has only seven interceptions in 385 career pass attempts. He had a 4-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio last season with 16 TDs and just four interceptions.
Greene isn’t slinging the ball downfield with reckless abandon — he takes shots when the opportunities are there and generally keeps the ball out of danger.
It’s the same with Greene’s scrambling — he’s doesn’t bail out and run at the first sign of trouble, he picks and chooses his spots to take off. Greene has averaged over six yards per carry over his entire career and averaged 6.4 yards on 120 carries in 2023.
He was sacked just five times the entire 2023 season, as many as backup Nicco Marchiol took in barely two full games.
This isn’t to say Greene is a perfect player or even a finished product. He’s struggled with inconsistent accuracy, only completing 53% of his passes last year. That hurt the Mountaineers on third down — they ranked 61st in the nation with a 39.1% success rate, and in the redzone, 66th in the nation with an 84.6% scoring rate.
“The problem with him last year was we were home run or incompletion,” Brown said. “He’s got to be a more-efficient passer. I think he can really make a big jump upwards of being in the low 60s (in completion percentage). If he does that, we’re going to be better on third down and we’re going to be better in the red zone. Even though he had a great year last year, there’s a significant opportunity for him to make huge improvements going into the 2024 season.”
Accuracy has been Greene’s main focus this entire offseason.
“I think the big ones were the short and intermediate throws,” Greene said at media days. “My misses on those weren’t an arm thing, it was really my feet. So the last two or three months, I’m really honing in on my feet and working on my small mechanics.”
With one year of college eligibility left, there’s not much left for Greene to be patient for. A repeat of Greene’s 2023 production would be good. A step up in play would be great as the Mountaineers aim to contend for a Big 12 title this season.
TWEET @DomPostSports
