Garrett Greene has taken a three-pronged approach toward improving this off-season.
The senior quarterback first had to take ownership of his own personal development in order to improve in those areas that needed some fine tuning, most notably with his accuracy.
Despite a breakout season a year ago, Greene only completed 53-percent of his passes and that can be attributed to some corrections that needed to be made in his fundamentals at the position.
It’s something Greene was cognizant of heading into the winter because despite his success he felt that he didn’t perform to the level that he holds himself to.
It started with Greene making a cutup of both his best and worst throws across the course of the year and charting the consistencies in both areas with his feet and release of the ball.
“That’s what this off-season has been about. Finding my weaknesses,” he said.
From there, a plan was developed between Greene, the West Virginia coaching staff and his own personal quarterback trainer David Morris from Quarterback Country in Mobile.
It’s a plan that was put into motion three months ago with Greene working on his own, with the coaches and then several times with Morris, who he has trained with for several years outside the building.
“A lot of it is just body position and consistency. We watched the cut ups last year of all the pass plays and the inconsistencies in my drop really showed up,” Greene said. “That’s what caused the inaccuracies. Going back to the basic fundamentals of drop mechanics and timing the drops up to the routes.”
The goal for Greene is to increase his completion percentage enough to where the floor is in the high 60-percent range and working with new quarterbacks coach Tyler Allen has helped there. The two have known each other since Allen was at Troy and there is a comfort level already well established.
One of the focuses has been precision accuracy and letting the ball take the pass catchers to where they don’t have to break stride and can simply run through the ball.
"He has a lot to improve on. He was 101st in completion percentage at 53-percent that’s the obvious thing," Allen said.
While head coach Neal Brown and Allen have focused primarily on the scheme, the job of Morris is to work on the fundamentals of playing the position. Greene has worked with Morris since his freshman season with the focus on the basics of becoming a more efficient quarterback.
Greene saw Morris once in January and again in February, then spent a few days on spring break with him. He also has maintained communication and sending clips to him to talk through some issues. He plans to see him several more times before the season gets underway, as well.
This is conjunction with what the West Virginia coaches are doing.
“They’ve been really great about communicating with him. They put it in on David whatever he wants to teach and whatever he knows I should do he’s relaying that back up to coach Brown and TA,” Greene said. “That the coaching points he gives down in Mobile are transferred up to here.”
Brown also has a trust with Morris given the fact that he knows him well and sees the benefits.
“And there’s some things we just can’t do with him. He knows Garrett personally and they’ve worked together a long time, so he’s seen the transition from where he was in high school to now,” Brown said.
There are likely to be some steps back in order to step forward as the process proceeds, but all that matters is that it ends up where each want it to be.
“I think he’s on a path to get there,” Brown said.
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