West Virginia football team still discovering personality

The West Virginia football team has only practiced together as one unit handful of times since things abruptly stopped March 12.

There were of course the obvious issues created by the pandemic that spanned for months and then when the Mountaineers did resume activities as a team, it was split into two groups by design to help prevent any sort of spread of COVID-19.

Now West Virginia is back working as a full team but there remains the question of what type of personality will this group have? The personality of a football team is one of the key elements in the off-season and one that helps coaches realize what type of group they have from year-to-year.

Obviously having an older, more mature team helps on that front as they’ve already been through the battles on the field, but you must work with what you have on your roster.

“I don’t know if this team has developed a personality. We got some guys that have played some football but we’re relatively inexperienced,” head coach Neal Brown said.

Brown would like to see his team become more player-driven than how it is currently coach-driven from a leadership standpoint and he has seen the tides start to turn. Still they aren’t quite there yet.

The hope is that this West Virginia team develops into one that plays with a chip on their shoulder and feels like they have something to prove. Brown points to the fact that the Mountaineers are coming off a 5-7 campaign and were picked 8th in the Big 12 Pre-Season Media Poll as a good starting point.

That alone should be enough motivation to make the team hungry to go out and rewrite the narrative while playing with an edge in the process.

“You either prove them right or prove them wrong,” Brown said.

That is going to be the challenge for this West Virginia football team as it looks to try to live up to what Brown has referred to as the goal of being one of the most improved teams in the nation.

There is still time to develop as a football team, but Sept. 12 will be here soon, and Brown wants to see his club hungry and ready to compete.

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