Neal Brown was vacationing last week when he found out about the Big 12 Preseason Poll.
That poll had West Virginia finishing dead last in the Big 12 and Brown’s message at Big 12 Media Days on Thursday was his team won’t finish where they expect them to.
“Upset about the media poll. Definitely do not agree with that,” Brown said. The positive is the media as far as predicting the Big 12 has not been very successful in predicting the Big 12.”
Brown and the Mountaineers finished 5-7 last year and entering year five under Brown, it is no secret it is now or never for Brown to win.
“First of all is starts with belief in our staff and belief in our players,” Brown said. “Offensively this is going to be our best group. We have 132 starts returning on our offensive line… Defensively, we’re going to be one of the most improved units in the Big 12, if not the country.”
Brown added, “looking forward to proving everybody wrong on that front (preseason poll) and we won’t finish there.”
Brown said he addressed the team earlier this week about that poll and he has belief in the people around him at West Virginia that this year will be different than people expect.
“I think your best opportunity is to just confront it,” Brown said of the preseason poll. “We had a team meeting on Tuesday when we talked about it in detail, in probably in more colorful terms than I just did here. But a lot of the same things that I said to our team, I repeated here in front of you all.
“I have a strong belief. What we spend a lot of time on is talking about being better. We have a clear vision on what we have to improve on.”
That vision starts with being more productive on offense, and eliminating errors such as penalties and explosive plays on defense.
“If you talk about offensively we’ve got to get better efficiency wise especially in on first down and in the red zone. We have to be more explosive and we have to eliminate errors. Defensively, what we’ve got to do better is we’ve got to limit the explosive plays… and we’ve got to be able to create takeaways. The explosive plays and lack of takeaways last year were the biggest negative effect on us defensively.”
Brown’s full focus is now on the guys in his locker room and focusing on themselves, as they progress into fall camp.
“We’ve been focused on ourselves, getting ourselves better,” Brown said of the offseason. “This is to be something that’s going to increase the size of the chip. The chip was already there on the shoulder, this just increases the size.”
