Neal Brown discusses West Virginia's scrimmage
West Virginia held the second scrimmage of fall camp on Saturday, and it was a mixed bag.
The Mountaineers ran a little over 100 plays and hit all four of the core special teams with a Big 12 officiating crew in tow. That led to some good situational work in areas such as the goal line, red zone, opening drive, and third and fourth down periods.
“A lot of good work. Wasn’t real fired up about some of it. I thought some individuals really showed up but there were some disappointing things in it as well,” Brown said. “Really the last three practices we’ve kind of been trending upward and just not our best today. I can make excuses for them but I’m not.”
Brown said that it wasn’t terrible by any means, but the Mountaineers did fall short in a number of key areas. And with a veteran team, the standard is higher for them across the board.
“It’s a daily standard and we fell short,” Brown said.
Brown felt that his football team was ready to go and had good energy but just lacked in areas of execution.
On special teams, Brown was encouraged by the way that Michael Hayes kicked the football off and Hudson Clement has started to separate himself as the kick returner. However, punting needs to be more consistent across the board but the punt return, and punt block teams did some nice things.
On defense, West Virginia started off well, but the play fell off as some of the players got tired from playing a number of different snaps.
Some of that was by design as the coaching staff wanted to get an extended look at some of the players competing at various spots such as safety. Brown was encouraged by the play of the defensive line but felt that the unit needed to play cleaner overall.
West Virginia started slow on offense but picked things up as the scrimmage continued with the run game going during the second part but again it was simply not clean enough. Quarterback Garrett Greene played only two series before giving way to Nicco Marchiol who got reps with the first team unit.
“We’ve got a bunch of guys that have played a bunch of football,” he said.
The plan now is to start narrowing down the various position battles and Brown plans to watch the film from the scrimmage in order to make some determinations on where players fit into things.
West Virginia will treat both the Monday and Tuesday practices like the in-season Tuesday and Wednesday practices and the coaching staff will then hold a mock game Wednesday. When it comes to freshmen, the Mountaineers are going to play the ones that prove capable of handling the role.
“It’s all about evaluating personnel, can a guy make a competitive play in a scrimmage, in a live-game scenario,” Brown said.
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