It was only the third week of the season but West Virginia head coach Neal Brown felt that it was going to be a defining moment for the season – win or lose.

Coming off a 38-7 loss to Missouri where the Mountaineers showed little signs of life, it was a turning point for the program in the early stages of the Brown era.

“It didn’t go very well,” Brown said of the past week’s efforts.

In response to that the program had a very difficult, but rather necessary week on the practice field. Things were laid out for the players and they were challenged on both sides of the ball.

The Mountaineers needed to get tough in a hurry and that message was clear cut from the coaches following the loss to the Tigers. So it was back to the drawing board.

That message? If the program wanted to experience success moving forward, an edge was going to be required. An edge that clearly wasn’t there against the Tigers and one that must eventually become the identity of the program on the football field.

How did the sessions go?

“Really intense,” sophomore defensive end Dante Stills said.

“It was very intense, very hard. Our coaches want to succeed so bad and you can see that in their eyes,” junior defensive tackle Darius Stills said.

To accomplish that was a four-step approach with effort on every snap, being physical, doing what the players are coached to do and finally investing time and energy into preparation.

“For us to play wining football we have to identify ourselves as a blue-collar unit. We have to out-work people. We have to out-physical people and we embraced that this week,” Brown said.

It showed.

It isn’t about when adversity hits, instead how teams respond to it. Well, for one game West Virginia passed with flying colors against North Carolina State.

West Virginia simply out-toughed the visitors in every aspect of the game. The Mountaineers tripled the amount of rushing yardage from the first two games going from 54 carries for 64 yards to 173 rushing yards against a Wolfpack defense that averaged only allowing 24.5 yards per game.

“What you saw on that field today was a product of that. We embraced who we’ve got to be,” Brown said. “It was a three phase win.”

A defining moment, that paid off for the Mountaineers.

The coaches issued an open challenge to the players asking who was going to be tough and who was ready to buy in and help build the foundation in year one under the new staff? It was only one football game but the possible ripples of what unfolded this week could be felt down the line.

The Mountaineers want to grind out games and wear people down. That’s their edge even though it didn’t quite hit some of them until being challenged. The offensive line played angry, the running backs hit holes and made people miss, while the receivers blocked on the edge.

The defense tackled, after missing 21 the week before, and special teams was a key element in beating a previously undefeated N.C. State team 44-27.

It was how the team responded all week in practice when they could have easily hung their heads given the youth and inexperience following the loss to Missouri. But they didn’t.

And that could end up being the biggest defining moment of all.

“How we responded all during the week, that was that was on the field,” Brown said.

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