West Virginia football officially welcomed 22 of the newest Mountaineers on Wednesday for what was Early National Signing Day for the class of 2024.
“Huge day for our program. Our plan and I’ve hit this before but I’ll hit it again. Our plan is to build our roster through high level high school student-athletes, develop them, and then retain them,” West Virginia head coach Neal Brown said.
Taking a village is exactly what Brown explained, naming all of the people involved with making today happen.
“It starts with Drew Fabianich. Drew as a general manager, does a great job just leading this whole department. Trey Neyer who’s the director of recruiting, he’s really the guy that makes this go. He’s got a great team. Ken Signoretti, Tyler Haywood, Ian Scaffidi, Morgan Montgomery, Cam Hall, those guys work tirelessly behind the scenes starting the evaluation process and then the communication, the early communication,” Brown said.
Brown then talked about the on-campus folks of what happens when recruits get here and how all of it ties in to getting to this point today.
“This is a huge day and it’s a culmination of a lot of hard work and a ton of investment by a lot of people,” Brown said.
Overall though, West Virginia had 22 letters of intent signed, with seven of them enrolling in January as early enrollees. They come from 10 different states, but 16 of them come from the surrounding states of Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia along with West Virginia.
“22 high school guys, seven of these guys will enroll early. Heavy in our local areas. We talk about local areas being within a six-hour radius. We signed 16 guys within our six-hour radius,” Brown said.
Brown mentioned defensive back being a “point of emphasis” with the Mountaineers adding five, while they also wanted to build on the line of scrimmage, adding six combined offensive and defensive lineman.
Outside of the guys that were expected to sign for a good while, West Virginia was able to flip four-star wide receiver Ric’Darious ‘DayDay’ Farmer.
The big one today was DayDay Farmer. DayDay, I think chad was one of his first offers, if not his first offer. Lot of credit to [offensive coordinator] Chad [Scott] and [wide receivers coach] Bilal [Marshall] because they just kept on. He’ll play early. He’s got to gain weight, but he’ll play early for us,” Brown said.
As far as what it takes to get someone like Farmer, it starts with building lasting relationships, and staying in contact with guys throughout the recruiting process.
“There’s some guys you just get a feel that this is the best place for them and you’re going to pursue them until the very end and that’s what it was with DayDay,” Brown said. “I felt like Chad, Bilal, and myself, all three of us had a really good connection with him.”
Brown would also talk about what goes into recruiting from him and his coaching staff’s perspective. He said he wants to be real with the players and not try to be a different recruiter than coach.
“You have to have honest communication. Second thing is I think you have to be who you are. What I mean by that is playing time is all about trust,” Brown said. “I think what happens in recruiting sometimes, is the individual who recruits the player is different than the individual who coaches the player.”
“What I mean by that is everything is great and there’s no difficult conversations, they try to be their friend in recruiting then when they get on campus, they’re completely different. Everything I try to do I try to look at it from that 16-17-18 year-olds perspective. To me, if as soon as they get on campus they’re treated differently, that would be hard to trust that individual,” Brown continued.
“I try to talk to our staff about be the same person recruiting that you are coaching them. Then sometimes that’s effective then sometimes that’s not. I think that’s the biggest thing for me is honest communication and then, be the same person in recruiting that you are when you have them on campus.”
The full list of signees can be found below:
