West Virginia Fall Camp Notebook
West Virginia worked the first day of full pads with tackling Tuesday which produced some positives, but the real challenge still lies ahead with how the Mountaineers are set to practice.
That’s because the first scrimmage of fall camp is set for Saturday and head coach Neal Brown wants to see his team continue to bring the same energy to practice Friday and then in the scrimmage the next day.
“After Saturday and beyond is the real test, that’s what I think,” he said.
The red zone:
West Virginia has been intentional in fall camp about the red zone.
It’s an area where the Mountaineers needed to improve on both sides of the ball after the offense only scored touchdowns on 35-58 attempts and the defense allowed touchdowns on 25-41 opportunities. The offense was 66th nationally overall but settled for too many field goals while the defense failed to generate stops.
“That’s really a point of emphasis for us. Offensively did a lot of good things but got to score more touchdowns down there. Defensively we’ve got to get some takeaways and make people kick down there,” Brown said.
Evolving year-to-year:
As with any offense, West Virginia wants to evolve from year to year for obvious reasons. For one, the roster isn’t exactly the same even with the amount of returning pieces and it allows the coaches to mix in some new wrinkles, so opponents won’t be able to focus on the exact same things as the season before.
The Mountaineers have core principles that they believe in on that side of the ball and have to decorate things differently. As far as personnel, West Virginia won’t have players such as offensive linemen Zach Frazier and Doug Nester along with wide receiver Devin Carter, so the coaches have to find out the strengths of some of those new players and mix them into the offense.
“Philosophically do you want to do a little bit of everything or be really good at your core principles? What we’re made the determination is we want to be really good at some core concepts both in the run game and the pass game and we want to be able to present those in multiple ways,” he said. “Right now, we’re a run first team and we want to be able to marry up everything we’re doing in the run game with our pass concepts.”
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