Neal Brown learns and adjusts during his time atop West Virginia
As a rule of thumb, West Virginia head coach Neal Brown doesn’t try to go back and look at ways he’d do things over.
In practicality, it’s a useless exercise, because the past can’t be changed.
But instead, the sixth-year headman focuses on what he learned during his time atop the football program. That way he can apply those lessons to the future, instead of playing the unwinnable game of what if?
But to humor me during our one-on-one sit down this summer, he did answer the question when I proposed it. “What would you tell your younger self when you took this job to help adjust here?”
The answer was two-fold for Brown.
On the football side, Brown felt that while he had no way to see into the future with the challenges that would arise with being away from his team due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues that would arise he could have sacrificed some early success in order to address the team culture.
It sounds easy enough now, but back then it wasn’t as easy to change the roster the way that you can now with the differences in the rules, but Brown believes he could have potentially done some things differently.
“I would have made some different decisions for the betterment of the program. And the decisions I made then were from a good standpoint,” he said. “I thought we could get bowl eligible even though the talent I knew wasn’t what it needed to be, but I felt like man maybe we can get bowl eligible, and we can take a step earlier than I thought”
“I probably would have made some decisions culturally that would have made our roster look a little different,” Brown added.
Then from a personal standpoint, Brown was in a different stage of life with his children and family than he was when he took the job at Troy.
Being a head coach is one clear responsibility, but being a father is another and with more activities his children have become involved with it is important for him to be an active part of that process despite the ongoing demands of the job.
“I could have done things better from a scheduling standpoint,” he said. “We’re morning practices now and that’s better for everybody involved the coaches and the players. From a scheduling standpoint and taking into account that I wasn’t in the same life standpoint.”
Brown is now 31-29 over his five seasons atop the program but is coming off his best campaign at 9-4 with a Duke's Mayo Bowl win over North Carolina.
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