Neal Brown doesn’t need any reminders.

His West Virginia football team finished the season 5-7 and that isn’t good enough. That’s not the standard for Mountaineers football and improving that mark is the key priority.

But there was some room for optimism namely how the program finished the season winning two of the last three, both of which came on the road over teams favored by double-digits.

“Thought we played our best football in November over the last three weeks of the season,” he said.

Naturally that leads to excitement for the future and where the program is going and isn’t much different than the first season Brown experienced in his previous job at Troy. That team finished 4-8 and won two of its last four games of the year to carry momentum into the off-season.

The Trojans would go on to win at least 10 games three years in a row.

It isn’t as easy as saying history will repeat itself however, as Brown understands that even with a high percentage of production returning on offense and defense this off-season is a significant one.

“We’ve got to focus on being one of the most improved teams in the country next year,” Brown said.

The key areas for that will be an improvement in the run game offensively and finding a way to create more turnovers on the defensive side of things.

When it comes to improving a rushing attack that was the worst in the modern era of West Virginia football with 879 total yards in 12 games. The Mountaineers were held to 51-yards or fewer in seven of those games and finished as the nation’s 128th best team, two away from the bottom.

The plan to improve comes in two areas with both a developmental piece that is going to require those on the roster to get stronger in the weight room as well as working on technique, pad-level and explosion. That comes with time considering how many young players were suiting up for the Mountaineers up front in 2019 and an off-season could do wonders there.

But it isn’t just on the offensive line either as the running backs must be more decisive with finishing runs and making people miss in space.

It’s also going to require the coaches to look in the mirror and explore what they could do differently from a schematic standpoint.

“When you’re poor at that area as we were everything is on the table,” Brown said.

The second component comes on the recruiting trail as the focus will be to find players that are going to be able to compete for playing time and raise the competition level in both of those rooms.

“There is a clear gap between that and anything else we have to get better at offensively,” Brown said.

It’s something Brown has gone through already during that first off-season at Troy as the offensive line added some new pieces and they decided to go back to the basics with the schematics.

But again that off-season was filled with a productive couple months following the football year and good senior leadership. That will be put to the test with the Mountaineers this off-season.

And the hope is that the fruits of that labor are results that are up the West Virginia standards.

----------

• 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