West Virginia football held their eighth practice of the spring on Wednesday, and their fifth practice over the past nine days.
This was purposeful from head coach Neal Brown, calling it the toughest part of spring, as he hopes to learn about the character of his team going forward.
“The toughest part of the spring for us, is last week we went Thursday, Saturday, Monday. Three physical days,” head coach Neal Brown said.
Brown made note of his receivers specifically, but the offense as a whole struggled throughout the day on Monday. Brown said his offense did not react well to the scheduling on Monday, but was happy with how they turned things around on Wednesday.
That piece of scheduling wasn’t by coincidence.
“The thing with scheduling in the spring, it’s kind of evolved a little bit. We on purpose, don’t go back-to-back days because there’s really no reason to and it allows you to practice the way you want to, where the guys can get their bodies healed,” Brown said.
However, the stretch WVU went into to end last week and start this week was purposeful. Brown wanted to challenge his team and see who has matured enough to be able to handle a physical stretch of football in a short period of time.
“On purpose when we built that, I wanted to be able to test them,” Brown said of the string of practices.
“We went a bunch of team, 11-on-11 Thursday. We went in the stadium, we were physical, and then we had to turn around and do it on Monday. I wanted to see who could do a little bit some hard things better. And maybe who hasn’t handled those things previously, who now has grown and matured and can handle that workload.”
This piece to WVU’s spring practice schedule isn’t the only thing that looks different. One thing about the Mountaineers is they are going later into the spring than many other schools across the country. Brown said they delayed the start of spring practice by a week, trying to eliminate injuries compared to previous years.
“We’re going one week later than what we’ve traditionally done. The reasoning is not necessarily to [the transfer portal window], it’s related to we had injuries the first week of spring ball last year, like right after spring break,” Brown said. “Our planning for this year, we wanted to come back and give a week buffer period between spring break and the actual first practice and then that just backed everything back a week.”
Brown and the Mountaineers are back at practice today (Friday) for practice No. 9 of the spring.
