MORGANTOWN — Football coaches always seem to have a quote to fall back on when his team faces adversity.
For WVU head coach Neal Brown, he had to find his inspiration just one game into the season following the Mountaineers’ 30-24 loss at Maryland last weekend.
From the best-selling book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, Brown tried to lift his team up with a quote from Admiral James Stockdale.
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
The reality right now for the Mountaineers is they are the only winless team in the Big 12. They also struggled early defensively and late offensively, with a laundry list of things that need corrected headed into Saturday’s home opener against Long Island (0-1) at Milan Puskar Stadium.
“As we move forward, we’ve got to learn from it and grow,” Brown said. “We didn’t perform very well. We’re judged on games in this business. One game won’t ruin a season. We’re going to highlight a bunch of teams that lost a game that was a 50/50 game to start and rebounded to have really good seasons. And we’re going to highlight those teams that it occurred within our league and there’s several you can look back at over the last four years.”
Brown is familiar, though not at WVU, with getting out of the gate slow. In 2017, Troy, led by Brown, started 0-1 with a tough offensive day against Boise State. The Trojans went on to win 11 games that season.
In 2018, it was a similar start as Troy was dismantled by Boise State 56-20 to open the season, but the Trojans again ended up winning 10 games at 10-3.
Brown isn’t ignorant to how bad his team played against the Terps.
“I’m not blind to what our brutal facts are right now and that’s that we’re 0-1 and we didn’t play very well,” he said. “Really, outside of our kickoff return unit and our kickoff team, I’m not sure that we won a whole lot of battles in the game, coaching or playing. That’s kind of our brutal reality. Once you know where you are, you got to know where you want to go. Our brutal reality is that we’re 0-1 in which we were soundly defeated. Offensively, we had three turnovers. We didn’t play physical enough up front. We weren’t consistent enough at quarterback. Defensively, we didn’t play to the standard that we’ve created here over the last year and a half.”
But he has a track record of turning it around and turning it around in a hurry. The No. 1 issue Brown said needs to be corrected if the Mountaineers have any shot at improving is cutting down the turnovers.
Of the four total turnovers:
- A bad interception by quarterback Jarret Doege on the first play after a key defensive stop.
- A muffed punt by Winston Wright after the defense got another stop.
- A fumble by Leddie Brown in Maryland territory on a 3rd and 1.
- An interception from Doege in the end zone on what Brown considered a “fluke” midway through the 4th quarter.
“We’re sitting here having a different story,” said Brown on if those turnovers don’t happen . “The fact that we didn’t play very well, if we don’t turn the football over, we win. I think that is the most important.”
Brown also mentioned a positive offensively, which was the Mountaineers scored three touchdowns, all by Leddie Brown, on their first four possessions. Now, trying to sustain that is one of the most important facets, especially with Virginia Tech and Oklahoma looming after the LIU game.
“We’re going to play a lot of these games that can go either way and that’s where we’re at right now with the schedule we play,” Brown said. “Our margin for error is really small. We can’t do things that hurt ourselves, which is the most infuriating thing about that game. It’s not that we lost. It’s how come we lost — turnovers, missed communication and things like that.”
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