West Virginia head coach Neal Brown argues a call during the first quarter of the team’s NCAA college football game against Houston, Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023, in Houston. (AP Photo/Kevin M. Cox)
MORGANTOWN — In the movies, they told us “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
To Neal Brown, there is love woven into the fabric of a football team, a love that sometimes is not the kind of love they were referring to in the 1970 movie “Love Story”.
In the aftermath of last Thursday’s night’s stunning turn of events that led to a last-second defeat on a Hail Mary pass at the hands of the Houston Cougars and former coach Dana Holgorsen, Brown knew his team’s confidence that led to four straight wins and now a 4-2 record had to be rebuilt on love.
Love, as he defines it.
“We talk to our players about love,” he said when asked about it during a Monday noon press conference that well could have been adopted into some psychology classes at West Virginia University.
“Sometimes it comes across as a soft word, but I don’t think it is,” Brown said. “To me, there’s two primary things when you talk about love. It’s telling them the truth and holding them accountable.
“To me, we want to have a program that fosters love and that means we have to tell them the truth and hold them accountable. I think, as a leader, you have to set that standard. I have to make more decisions than anyone in the program and therefore I make more mistakes than anyone.
“This is the way I look at this job, for better or for worse, I’m the one responsible for this job. There’s some things I’m in really close proximity to and make the decisions all the time and there’s some things that I’m not.”
“But, at the end of the day, I’m responsible for it all,” he said, accepting any and all accountability.
The truth, as Brown saw in the four or five times he rewatched the game, was that his team played badly, but while he was making that point, he was also absorbed in shining the glare of the spotlight in search of placing blame upon himself.
“I think you have to be transparent with that and I think you lose credibility without that. Whether it’s with your team or at home, you lose credibility if you are not transparent. We all make mistakes.”
Then you have to get through it.
“You go through phases. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I don’t want to minimize it, either. There’s real stuff going on, like real tough things so I’m not trying to put a football game up to that. You can turn on the news and figure that out,” he said.
He was referring, of course, to war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, to political turmoil, drug problems, homeless people wandering the streets.
Football does not reach those proportions, but within the Puskar Center and the community it represents, it is of no small importance.
“I don’t want to minimize it,” he said. “We put a ton of time and a ton of investment into it and when you lose it matters.”
And such a loss, one unlike any other he had experienced before in his career, has to be dealt with before moving forward.
“There’s a little of a grieving process you go through. It helps that we got more time [due to the Thursday game]but once you go through it there’s a period where you got to take ownership of what it involves,” he said.
Yes, he acknowledged that Houston deserved the victory.
“They played hard; they were hungry … but we lost the game. We didn’t lose the game on that last play,” he said.
He said on film he found 15 plays on offense, about 20 on defense, as well as some on special teams that could have cost the game.
He pointed them out so his team, all of them, could take ownership of it.
“Then. you have the response. We went through the ownership today, now we have to respond.”
And that doesn’t just happen.
“We’re in the teaching business, right? I would assume that coach Gundy and that group dealt with this after they lost to South Alabama and they came out on the other side pretty good. Now it’s up to our guys,” he said.
“You can’t control what happens all the time, but you can control your response so our response has to be that we fight.”
He was open about their mistakes and his own, honestly laying all the cards on the table. He has developed a philosophy that it must be that way.
“You evaluate everything when something doesn’t go well. We played really good on defense for four weeks in a row. We played the opposite of that on Saturday. Whatever the opposite of really good is, that’s what we played,” he said, relaying what he told his players.
“What I probably did a poor job is I didn’t measure our level of maturity as well as I should have. We played those really physical games, so I gave our guys some time off and we did not deal very well with unstructured.
“As the leader of it, and I am responsible for it all, go back and look through it and the first thing you do is self-reflect. The first thing that comes to mind is that I should have handled the bye week a little different. I should have stuck with our original plan which was to practice hard on Tuesday and Wednesday, but because of some injuries and where our team was, we didn’t.”
And then there was the final possession, the one that ended with the Hail Mary.
“I told our guys, if I had to do that again, I probably would have pressured and made them go faster.,” he said. “But, in any game, there’s things you would do different and you try to be transparent with your players about it.
“We didn’t execute well, but I could have had them better prepared, too.”
There was a lot of talk on the street and on the Internet that he should have gone not with his regular defense but had a special Hail Mary group on the field, including 6-7 tight end Kole Taylor.
He then explained why he hadn’t done that.
“We had our regular defense in because we knew they had two plays. We had a ‘last play’ grouping, but we didn’t put it in. We didn’t practice it last week mostly because of injuries. We quit using offensive guys several years ago after the Patriots had Gronkowski out there — I think the Dolphins beat them.
“Our best defensive guys are our best vertical guys, anyway. It didn’t have anything to do with that.”
He was transparent about it, honest about it.
It was the way he learned to be from his father.
“Where do the roots of my beliefs in that come from? Probably from my Dad who was a leader in a school system for a long time and is still working, 50-some years. He taught me early on that you make decisions and you live with them. If you’re right, give other people credit and if you’re wrong, the blame.”
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2023-10-17 05:11:58
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