BIG 12 CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYS

July 13, 2022

Neal Brown

West Virginia Mountaineers

Press Conference

NEAL BROWN: Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. Proud to represent West Virginia University and the great state of West Virginia.

I want to welcome Commissioner Yormark to the Big 12. It's a crazy time in college football, as everybody in this stadium knows, and feel really confident about the leadership of our conference moving forward.

I want to take a quick second and just make a note of who we have here representing our program: Defensive lineman Dante Stills; quarterback Charles Woods, neat experience for him because this is home for him, so he's able to come back; offensive lineman Zach Frazier; and receiver Bryce Ford-Wheaton; and then our champion for life is wide receiver Sam James, who's also with us.

We're 50 days away from the Backyard Brawl, the return of the Backyard Brawl, 19 days until we have our first practice.

It's been a productive off-season. Staff adjustments on offense highlighted by the addition of offensive coordinator Graham Harrell has been very beneficial. We remade our roster to mirror the type of football team that we want to be, and that gives us the best opportunity to win in this league. We've had 33 additions to our roster since January. Our work ethic, our leadership and our team chemistry are much improved, and experiencing great success on the recruiting trail.

Quick kind of preview, offensively we return our top seven offensive linemen, two receivers, two of our top receivers in Sam James and Bryce Ford-Wheaton, two experienced tight ends, and then we've got a competition at the quarterback position I'm sure that you all want to talk about.

Defensively a lot of experience returning on our defensive line, like the athleticism of our linebackers with Exree Loe and Lance Dixon, huge addition to Lee Kpogba, it's going to be a difference maker there. At corner, I like the group we have, Charles Woods. We've had some experience through the transfer portal, as well. Inexperience at safety, you know.

Then special teams-wise, return Casey Legg, who's Preseason All-Conference. Add a kickoff specialist that will compete for our field goal job, as well, in Parker Grothaus. And our punting job is open.

We play a tough schedule. It's been well documented. Two non-conference games, two rivalry games that are both on the road, 11 Power Five opponents, and then a great schedule here in the Big 12.

It's going to be a big challenge for us, and with that I'll take questions.

Q. Since you've arrived at West Virginia, you've had tough, hard-nosed defensive teams. Will you be able to maintain that culture after going maybe a little more passing air-raid on offense and then losing some of the contributors that you lost on defense through the transfer portal?

NEAL BROWN: We think this defensive unit has the opportunity to be the best that we've fielded so far. We're never going to lose what makes West Virginia special, and that's a toughness. We really try to mirror the mindset of our state, and West Virginia, it's a blue-collar group that goes to work, and it's really proud of their heritage.

That's the same fundamentals that we're trying to look for and trying to put on the field on the defensive side of the ball every Saturday.

I like our group. It's a group that has had unique paths. If you look at a guy like Lee Kpogba, who came in in spring ball, who will be our starting Mike linebacker, not a traditional path, but here he is, and we think he's got a chance to be one of the better linebackers in our league.

You look at Charles Woods who's representing us today, FCS All-American that made the jump to Power Five football and had the leading coverage numbers in our league according to PFF data last year.

We're a group that's going to be tough, physical. I like the pieces that we've added. I think through the portal on defense what we were looking to add is guys that were experienced and that were selfless, that could be great teammates, and we've done that.

I think the collection of players that we're going to have, our whole is going to be maybe better than each individual.

Q. You kind of touched upon new offensive coordinator Graham Harrell right there. Can you go into more detail about what he's been able to bring to the locker room so far? And what's been the biggest improvement you've seen in the offense with Harrell?

NEAL BROWN: I should expect a Lubbock guy to talk about Graham, right? No, here's what Graham has brought is he's brought a different energy about him. He's confident without being arrogant. He's extremely humble. It helps that he was a great player in this league, and I think that gets the players' attention on your current roster but also in recruiting.

He's had great success at not only USC but at North Texas, as well. He's been able to have success with different types of players and different types of offenses.

I'm excited what he can bring. He's been a great staff member. I think we're going to see the benefits.

The biggest for me is he's got a great feel on game day. So that's something that I think is going to be a huge positive, and it'll be not only for our players but for me, great feel on game day, so I'm looking forward to it.

Q. How much can Graham put in so early? Does it have to be incremental, or did he put a lot in in the spring?

NEAL BROWN: We basically put everything that we have in in the spring, and that's kind of -- from a schematic standpoint and part of the reason why I felt like Graham was the best fit for us at West Virginia, schematically, we don't anticipate being a whole lot different.

Where we're going to be different is in our preparation, in our practice habits, and in our ability to probably be more prepared going into each and every game.

But from a schematic standpoint, everything that we were going to do, we installed in spring ball. We've been repping them all summer, and we'll use the fall camp practice schedule to refine those even more.

But what we're going to run, we've had put in.

Q. Coach, you've indicated your support for the NIL process and have put a number of different programs in place. Are you concerned at all about the players' time management? That seems to have the potential to be another big drain on their resources.

NEAL BROWN: You know, I think that we live in an era now where there's a lot of pulls on our players' times, and the ability to manage time, not only for the student-athletes but for staff, for myself, gets harder and harder.

I'm for name, image and likeness. I think I said this in this exact same chair here a year ago. We've got to figure out some guardrails on it where we can still help student-athletes, but it's not necessarily used as an inducement.

But that is. A lot of our preparation for our players is about time management because we feel like the thing that everybody has the same is the same amount of time, and how you manage that is a real differential in the success of each individual.

So with name, image and likeness, that's been a huge part of what we're doing with the character development piece of our 5th Quarter Program.

Q. Neal, I don't know how involved you were in the discussions, but can you take us through the resumption of the Backyard Brawl, and how big is that for the Pitt and West Virginia programs?

NEAL BROWN: Well, it's an important rivalry. I wasn't there when the initial contract was signed to play Pitt. Shane Lyons, our athletic director, he asked me about the continuation of the series, which we'll do later in the decade, and I was for it. It's really important for us to play regional rivalries.

The Backyard Brawl, be my first opportunity to be a part of it. Our fan base is extremely passionate about that game. So it's a game that I would be in favor of playing each year.

I think it's a great kickoff for college football. We're not playing on so-called week zero, but we are the premier Power Five game versus Power Five opponent on Thursday night, and our guys are excited.

It's been a great carrot for our guys as we've gone through winter, through spring ball, now through summer workouts to know that, man, we've got not only a game to look forward to but it's a rivalry game that's going to be in prime time.

Q. You have the longest trip out of just about anyone here. I'm wondering if you see UCF and some of these other longer trips that are going to be added to the Big 12. Is that as big of an issue as some people make it out to be now with jets and stuff like that?

NEAL BROWN: It's not for football. I can only speak from a football perspective. The travel is not that big a deal. You're going to do four games, four away games, and at least a couple trips to Texas each year. Some years you're going to have five away games.

But you're talking about the difference between a two-hour flight and maybe a two-and-a-half-hour flight. We're going to leave on Friday afternoon and get there Friday evening.

The only thing that's detrimental is sometimes if you play a night game on the road, in Lubbock or in Fort Worth, then you're looking at a really early Sunday morning return. And so you've got to be careful how you handle that Sunday and Monday on the back end.

Now, for Olympic sports, it's a different story. But in football, it's not as big an issue as maybe what it gets talked about.

Q. I'm curious what the anxiety level is among Big 12 football coaches with this realignment. In your mind do you think the Big 12 could position itself to be a third super conference, and would it have to add more teams to be able to do that?

NEAL BROWN: The good thing about it is I've got a lot of worries and a lot of concerns, but conference realignment is way down the list for me. Now, the guys that spoke first, it's probably a different story, right.

For us, those decisions are not getting made by football coaches. Those decisions are getting made at a much higher level.

I'll say -- I'll repeat what I said in our opening statement. I'm really excited about the direction of the Big 12 Conference. I think some things over the last few weeks have created a great opportunity for our league. From a West Virginia perspective, we played in -- we're a little bit different than maybe some of the other schools that uniforms are up here.

We've played in multiple leagues over the last 50 to 75 years. We've even been an independent. The one constant is that West Virginia football has always been successful and always figured out a way to make it work.

So from a long-term perspective, I have great faith that West Virginia football is going to be just fine. In the short term, I like the direction. I think we have some unique opportunities. I think the leadership of our conference has made some really good decisions with the additions, and I have strong belief that they will continue to do so.

Q. You added in a couple of transfers in the defensive back room, one of which was Jaylon Shelton from Tyler Junior College and Wesley McCormick from James Madison who has five years of starting experience. When you look back when you had one of the top defensive backs in 2019 in the conference, what have you seen from their development in your defense, and what have you seen from the leadership aspect of McCormick?

NEAL BROWN: Yeah, appreciate the question. When we looked at what we had returning in our secondary, we liked the youth that we had. We've got some guys that can really run that are in their first or second year within our program.

The one thing that we were intentional about trying to improve defensively is we've been a primary zone coverage team over the last two years, and we've had success. It's been successful for us.

But we haven't been able to create as much havoc up front because when you play zone coverage, you only can rush four, five guys at one time. We wanted to get faster, more athletic in the back end so we could play more coverage so we could rush six and maybe even seven sometimes.

Through our addition, and we've had several, Wesley McCormick who is a multiple year starter at James Madison at corner, really like his ability. We think he's got an opportunity to compete for a starting John. Jaylon Shelton has versatility that can play safety or corner that can really run. Jasir Cox from North Dakota State, multiple national champion, multiple year starter, gives us some flexibility to play both outside linebacker positions and our nickel position.

We added Rashad Ajayi from Colorado State who started 35 games at Colorado State.

So we've been able to add some guys -- Marcus Floyd from Murray State who was there with us in the spring.

When we're looking at that, we wanted to be more athletic, we wanted guys that had experience starting, and they all have experience starting outside of Jalen, we're extremely excited about his athleticism, but we also wanted guys that added versatility and would check themselves at the door, meaning do what we asked them to do within the concept of a team. I've been really pleased with those guys so far, and I think that our secondary is going to be a real positive surprise to maybe some people that are in this room.