West Virginia has to be more efficient throwing the football.
The Mountaineers connected on just 10-31 passes against Oklahoma, with starter Garrett Greene misfiring on 17 of those attempts in the game. Some of it can be attributed to drops as the pass catchers had around five in the game, but there’s more at the base of the issue.
Greene simply has to improve his overall fundamentals when it comes to throwing the football, notably getting his body aligned correctly and avoiding falling off to the left.
Those were also issues against BYU, but the redshirt junior was able to get away with it. That wasn’t the case against Oklahoma despite the fact that there were indeed open wide receivers to get the ball to.
“And he knows this. He has to get them corrected or he’s going to be a 50-percent passer and that’s not good enough,” Brown said.
On the season Greene is connected on just 51-percent of his 210 pass attempts. He’s certainly had success with 1,699 yards and 12 touchdowns while only tossing 3 interceptions but there is a higher ceiling available if he can address some of his fundamental issues.
On top of fixing those issues, West Virginia spent the early part of this week looking at things from a coaching perspective in order to help Greene see the field better. That meant thinning down an already thin passing playbook to focus on the ones where Greene has had success.
The Mountaineers also used Tuesday and Wednesday in practice to work those plays against every look they could possibly get in order to further fine tune things. The goal is to give Greene the best chance to perform and allow him to understand what is being asked of him.
“I think that he’ll be better, and we’ll give him a better chance Saturday,” Brown said.
As for the drops, that hasn’t been a recurring issue this season so that simply comes down to playing with both focus and concentration. The coaching staff was encouraged by how the players responded when practice was moved to Sunday this past week and now will look to move forward.
“We didn’t see that performance coming, we have to hit the reset button and focus and get back on track,” offensive coordinator Chad Scott said.
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