Hours before the calendar flips to 2021, the Mountaineers will return to the turf.

Yet, the only calendar that Neal Brown is focused on conveys the events of the next 10 days.

Coming off a 5-4 regular season, West Virginia will face off with Tennessee in next week’s Liberty Bowl — the first bowl appearance of Brown’s head coaching tenure.

The bowl bid was not a surprise, but the Mountaineers still face an uphill battle in preparing for the 3-7 Volunteers. After the team’s regular season finale against Oklahoma was canceled due to COVID-19 concerns, the Mountaineers will have gone nearly a full month without game action come the bowl’s New Year’s Eve kickoff.

If they had not been invited to the Liberty Bowl, the Mountaineers likely would have played in the First Responders Bowl on Dec. 26 — one week earlier.

“Playing on the 31st is better for us because we had that extended break,” Brown said Sunday. “We probably need a little more time to kind of get back in the flow of playing.”

The Mountaineers have had light workouts for the past two days, and will continue with those workouts hoping to get players back into the flow before beginning any sort of game preparation.

“We won’t treat this like fall camp or spring ball or anything like that,” Brown said. “Once we get back into the flow and going against each other, we’ll get into our Tennessee prep with the expectation of playing well on the 31st because the last time we played we did not play very well, and I don’t think that’s a good representation of who we’ve been in the 2020 season. We want to respond and finish in the right way.”

Ultimately, Brown estimates they will have “nine or 10” practices before kickoff.

The Mountaineers will have to prepare without star linebacker Tony Fields — West Virginia’s leading tackler. Fields announced on Dec. 12 that he would skip the game and prepare for the 2021 NFL Draft.

Outside of Fields, Brown says that nobody else has communicated that they will not play, leaving the Mountaineers with almost their entire roster to use. The team plans on playing a handful of younger players in the game, including some who have already seen time this season, resulting in a much deeper bench for WVU.

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