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West Virginia University head football coach Neal Brown said the focus on ‘football culture’ played a key role in the teams’ success.
West Virginia University head football coach Neal Brown said the focus on ‘football culture’ played a key role in the teams’ success.
MORGANTOWN — It may be the most overlooked aspect of team building for you can’t see it on film, you can’t time with a stopwatch and you can’t measure it in pounds lifted or inches jumped.
Talent, yes, is a necessity for a winning a team but for a team — be it talented or not so talented — to reach its full potential it has to have a strong culture within its locker room and the West Virginia coaches believe that played a major role in the step forward taken by West Virginia last football season.
Brown emphasized building culture in the post COVID years as he rebuilt his roster, demanding that talent not be the only requirement necessary to be a Mountaineer.
Co-defensive coordinator and defensive back coach ShaDon Brown suggests that Brown’s willingness to say “no” often was more important than saying yes when it came to selecting prospects.
“I always tease Coach Brown because he says no more than he says yes, and he does that because of our culture,” Brown said during Thursday’s media event after the fifth spring practice.” Our culture is really strong because we trimmed some fat and don’t bring in guys who have been cancers at other places, no matter what their talent.”
Sometimes, it isn’t easy to say no, the same amount of work goes into working a high school prospect that it does someone out of the portal.
“Coach Brown, sometimes he makes me mad and I’ve known him for a long time, but if a guy is not a fit for us, he say ‘Nope.’ I know the player is good, but he’s looking at it from a 30,000-foot view of what that guy with whatever he is going to bring to us is going to do to our locker room.
“If he isn’t going to enhance the locker room, he won’t take that guy. That’s why the program is so much better now. Kudos to what Coach Brown has done in building the program. When everyone was trying to run us out of here, he was still trying to build the culture in the locker room.”
Brown always has the final say and it’s important that he does the final analysis because he can stay those 30,000 feet above the recruiting fray.
“I think there’s some biases in general,” Brown said. “Sometimes with position coaches or as a coordinator you are looking at one specific area. You are not always seeing the big picture. When you are seeing it from a real narrow point of view, that part of it is the most important.
“Whoever is recruiting a player, whether it’s a position coach or the coach responsible for that area of the country, he will be really close with the recruit. There’s going to be some bias there … and there should be.
“As the person who has to have a 30,000-foot view of it, you have to be able to make some decisions. Some of those decisions you are going to be right on, some of them you will be wrong on. But, through trial and error and making some poor decisions, we’ve settled on a process over the last two years where we look at character, academics and athletics and there’s some non-talent things from an athletic perspective that we look at.”
It’s hard sometimes to see a talented player who fits your scheme but doesn’t fit the values you believe in and you have to tell him he won’t be offered.
“You have to be OK if that player goes somewhere else. You have to be OK if they are successful somewhere else. You have to believe in the process,” Brown said.
Offensive line coach Matt Moore, a long-time Brown aide, says the lessons you take are sometimes painful.
“A lot of times as a coach you learn the lesson the hard way,” Moore said. “You see someone who is really a good player but he’s probably not what we’re looking for as far as culture, but you keep him and then you realize a year later, ‘Gosh, we made a mistake.’
“I think that’s what Neal has learned. You get older and older as a head coach, I think he learned maybe this guy is not quite as fast or tall, but he’s going to work harder and that’s the culture we want around here. Let’s go with that guy.’”
How does Brown reach a decision?
“I look at it from each position room’s perspective. There’s going to be some risk involved in judging players. You don’t want to have too much risk in a room. It’s like a financial portfolio. Some risk is good because there’s a big reward for those risks, but you don’t want your portfolio to be all risk.
“The other thing we look at if you are going to take a player with risk is if you have really good leadership in that room that he’ll fall in line behind it might work out.”
Brown breaks it down into two areas.
“I think, for us, from a character standpoint there’s your personal character and there’s your football character. From a football character standpoint it’s really important for the guys to strain and be tough people.
“If they show that on tape and talent is similar, we are going to take those tough people first. That’s how it works.”
Brown wants to make sure he goes beyond watching tape, though.
“When you get live evaluations, it’s important … can they bend, do they use their hands, but you also can tell if they can take coaching or if someone is correcting them are they hungry for that correction. Do they look that coach in the eye. Are they a BCDE guy — Blame, Complain, Defend, Excuse? Are they palms up?
“When you get live evaluations you can really tell and those are the things we talk about in the staff meetings. Are these are the type of players we want or are these the type of players who will get our butts beat if we take them.”
Every decision can affect the next team that goes on the field.
“In the portal era, I’m not sure that outside of the Top 8- to 10 teams — and I might even be high on that — I’m not sure there’s this huge talent discrepancy. Look at our league, I’m sure there’s a significant talent difference 1-through-16, so intangibles really matter,” Brown said.
“As to how they show up is that they show up kind of in the dark, like in the winter and the summer. They show up in the standards of your program, what you are allowing. If you get guys who are about the right things; guys with integrity, with discipline, accountability and those kind of character traits and on the football side if it means something to them and they are smart in understanding the game, are tough, then if you get the majority of your team that way, you have a chance.
“They will make a difference in the close games that you are going to play.”
And there will be close games.
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