Tough schedules await West Virginia football in Neal Brown era

Neal Brown’s first season as head coach at West Virginia will have its challenges.

Not only are the Mountaineers facing a tall order having to replace key playmakers from last season in quarterback Will Grier, wide receivers David Sills and Gary Jennings and linebacker David Long, but a daunting schedule sits in front of West Virginia for the 2019 campaign.

For the season, West Virginia’s schedule will feature 11 opponents from power five conferences and the FCS preseason No. 1 in James Madison week one in Morgantown.

READ: Behind Enemy Lines Early Look: James Madison

Part of the schedule is of course an always tough conference slate no matter where a team may rank in the standings. This year in particular features road matchups against Oklahoma, Baylor and TCU for the Mountaineers.

“It's a very challenging schedule,” Brown said.

It may be easy to look at the big picture when it comes to West Virginia’s schedule for this season, but Brown prefers for he and the team to focus on the present rather than beyond.

“First of all I knew what the schedule was when I took the job,” Brown said. “When you look at the schedule it is what it is. We don't talk to our players about it, kind of in a one-game mind-set, that's cliché.”

West Virginia is one of just four teams in the country that’ll play 11 Power Five conference teams this season, joining Purdue, Boston College and Stanford. In fact, the Mountaineers will continue to play 11 Power Five conference teams each season through 2024.

Obviously just four schools playing 11 Power Five schools is a small number and that usually means other power schools are scheduling either Group of Five or FCS opponents to fill out their non-conference slate most likely along with a Power Five team or two outside of their own respective conference.

For example, Ohio State, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin are among 11 Power Five schools that will not face a Power Five opponent this season outside of their conference schedule.

There are also schools such as Alabama and Clemson that will play at least one Power Five team outside of its conference (Clemson will face two Power Five teams in non-conference slate while the Crimson Tide will play one) but will have a couple of Group of Five/FCS schools mixed in. Each will play an FCS school in the month of November.

What building up these schedules with intriguing Power Five teams can do for the Mountaineers is give them a competitive edge if they’re able to have success and contend for more, but it can also attract more fans to these games.

For a program like West Virginia that is a geographic outlier in the Big 12, it makes it difficult for fans to travel to Big 12 away games, but with rivalries with Pitt, Penn State, Maryland and Virginia Tech set to be rekindled in the future, this presents an opportunity for fans to have shorter travel along with the anticipation of these renewed rivalries.

“I think it's important for us to play natural rivals, the series with Pitt is coming up, we play Virginia Tech,” Brown said. “Some of those type games make sense because it's hard for our fan base to travel, you know, so those geographic games and natural rivalries, I think they're important for us to play.”

This year’s schedule doesn’t feature an away game that’s close for West Virginia fans to travel to like last season when the Mountaineers battled Tennessee at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Two of West Virginia’s first three games (the non-conference slate) this season will be played at Milan Puskar Stadium against James Madison and N.C. State with a matchup on the road against Missouri sandwiched in between.

Along with the old rivalries being renewed in the future, a matchup against Florida State in the 2020 Chick-Fil-A Kickoff in Atlanta and home-and-home series with Alabama in 2026 and 2027 all await the Mountaineers as well.

“If you look at our future schedules, it's challenging,” Brown said.

The fan support at these upcoming games and competition of these non-conference matchups could go a long way in helping elevate the West Virginia program as the Neal Brown era gets underway in Morgantown and soon enough, everyone will get a first look at what the Mountaineers are made of.

----------

• Talk about it with West Virginia fans on The Blue Lot.

• SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest on Mountaineer sports and recruiting.

• Get all of our WVU videos on YouTube by subscribing to the WVSports.com Channel

• Follow us on Twitter: @WVSportsDotCom, @rivalskeenan, @PatrickKotnik

•Like us on Facebook