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West Virginia football preparing for different experience in many ways

The West Virginia Mountaineers football team has been adjusting to new practice settings and preparing for a different game day.
The West Virginia Mountaineers football team has been adjusting to new practice settings and preparing for a different game day.

It’s going to be a different experience for football this fall on many fronts.

No, the game itself won’t be changing outside a few minor rules but things certainly will be different in many other areas.

It’ll be different with significantly less fans, or no fans, in the stands and because of that a more subdued atmosphere like you’ve seen with professional leagues such as Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.

At times it has been so quiet, you can hear everything, and I do mean everything, that is unfolding on the floor and with the coaching staffs of those clubs.

West Virginia will not permit any spectators for the season opener, but is hoping to expand that from the Oct. 3 against Baylor onward.

But West Virginia head coach Neal Brown and his coaches have prepared for whatever this fall could bring from an optics as well as a competitive standpoint.

The Mountaineers are already preparing for what it could look like in a practice setting with a much-more subdued atmosphere with only the team, coaches and university employees permitted to be in attendance. That has required Brown to dig deep at times and manufacture energy.

“It’s different. Wednesday’s practice I came in and I was worn out, I was tired because it was one of those days where we had a few of them that weren’t ready to go so I spent my energy trying to get them ready to go,” he said.

It could also mean changes to the game-day coaching operations such as some old fashioned methods like calling in plays to the quarterback.

Brown is already familiar with adjusting on the fly after being forced to do so in the 2017 New Orleans Bowl when Troy, where he was head coach at the time, squared off against North Texas. Brown noticed on the first series of that game that a former staff member was eyeballing the signals across the field and it was right then and there that it hit him.

“As much as I think about everything I didn’t think about signs getting stolen,” he said.

So instead of those signals, Brown had his quarterback Brandon Silvers either run to the sideline or he communicated with him in order to get the correct plays in without running that risk. The end result was a Trojans 50-30 win over the Mean Green.

“So we’ve done it before,” Brown said.

To prepare for what could be different this fall, Brown and his coaches developed multiple ways to signal and call their plays. The biggest challenge is ensuring that the defensive players, especially those guys on the front aren’t able to hear the codes or the quarterback verbalizing the calls.

It’s going to be a very different fall this year when the ball is kicked off Sept. 12 against Eastern Kentucky, but one that Brown and company are prepared to face.

“You’ve got to watch what you say because everything is going to be heard,” Brown said.

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