West Virginia quarterback Garrett Greene (#6) strolls into the end zone for a score during a game earlier this season.
(Photo by Frank Salucci/BlueGoldNews.com)
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MORGANTOWN — Neal Brown laughed.
He’s doing that a lot more these days. He’s guaranteed a winning record, a bowl game, maybe even his job now, so sitting up there at a table in the WVU football team room facing the media, as he does every Monday, is far less of a sparring match then it was when they were talking about his team being No. 14 in the 14-team Big 12.
This was magnified many times over this week, coming off a 42-21 victory over Cincinnati, one of those rare games where the three-touchdown margin of victory didn’t really reflect the domination his team showed as it rushed for 424 yards and soared past 600 total yards.
It was that 424-yard rushing performance, so effective that he could not choose a single offensive player of the week after Jaheim White had rushed for 204 yards and a touchdown and added a 75-yard TD reception from Garrett Greene, who shared the honor with him after rushing for 154 yards and 3 touchdowns and passing for 210 more yards, that led to a question that had him laughing.
“Ten years ago would you have imagined coaching a team that rushed for 424 yards in a game?” was the question, and as he heard it a laugh came out, knowing the absurdity that would have been.
See, in 2013, Brown was at Troy and his team was ranked 8th in the nation, averaging 331.5 yards a game … passing, not rushing.
“I laugh because a guy that coached me sent me a text the other day and said — he was just laughing because early on when I started calling plays back in ’08, we were top 5 in passing for several years. Now we’ve kind of flipped it,” Brown admitted.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to run the ball.
“We had a good year rushing back in Troy my last year when our starting quarterback got hurt and we became a predominantly running team,” he added.
“But, yeah, it’s been kind of a 180.”
Interestingly, it is something being seen throughout most of the Big 12, where once you needed a license from the FAA to coach a team, the ball spent so much time in the air.
All you need do is look back upon one of WVU’s first Big 12 games — the 11th anniversary of which will be celebrated Saturday at Baylor.
That game saw WVU win, 70-63, with Geno Smith completing 45 of 51 passes (let that sink in, 6 incompletions) for 656 yards and 8 touchdowns while Baylor’s Nick Florence completed 29 of 47 for 581 yards and 5 scores.
In that 2013 season, Big 12 quarterbacks ranked third, fourth and two of them tied for fifth in the nation in passing yards per game — Florence averaging 331.46 yards per game, Oklahoma’s Landry Jones averaging 328.23 yards a game, Geno Smith and Seth Doege of Texas Tech and brother WVU’s Jarret Doege averaging 323.41 yards per game.
This season Oklahoma is seventh in the nation at 314.7 yards a game, TCU 9th at 309.3 and Texas next at 276.3 … and both Oklahoma and Texas leave the conference next year.
Ten years ago the Big 12 had five of the top 10 passing teams in college football, and the Mountaineers were No. 10 at 330.15 yards a game.
WVU’s different, Brown is different.
Garrett Greene is the difference and while it may be something different for Brown, it isn’t for WVU.
“I think this is what’s best for this team,” Brown said. “History has proven this. Here (at West Virginia) the most effective way to win is with a dual threat quarterback.”
Brown will get no argument from Don Nehlen, who had Major Harris lead the Mountaineers to an unbeaten 1988 regular season, or Rich Rodriguez, who got to the doorstep of a national championship game with Pat White, who won four bowl games.
But that’s not all there is.
“The game has changed, too. There’s changes in the game that have pushed us to this. So, yeah, if you asked me 10 years ago if I would be coaching the team who was fourth in the nation in rushing, I didn’t have the vision for that.”
Certainly, he couldn’t envision building the offensive line that WVU now has, especially in the first year at WVU when the team failed to rush for 800 yards over the entire season.
And then Greene came into his life.
“Our quarterback is a game changer,” Brown said. “And we have multiple running backs who can play and our tight ends have done a nice job. The pieces we have in place right now are being utilized in the right way.”
Now WVU is used to seeing a team being successful with a dual threat quarterback.
It all started with three games left in last season when Brown went to Greene to replace JT Daniels. He had a vision that Greene could do the things that this team would scream out for this year.
“A dual threat quarterback gives you a chance and you don’t have to be perfect,” Brown said. “If you have a passing quarterback and you are playing someone more talented than you, you have to be perfect or you have to do some things that are not traditional like ‘rub routes’.
“With a dual threat, you don’t have to be as perfect.”
They came into the season with an idea that they had a special offense but facing Penn State at first, he didn’t want to put it all on Greene for fear that it could ruin his confidence moving forward.
WVU then beat Duquesne with Pitt next. Greene was getting into it against Pitt but injured his ankle and Nicco Marchiol replaced him for a couple of weeks.
Brown couldn’t run what he wanted to run with Greene when Marchiol was quarterbacking, not because he couldn’t do it, but because there was no experienced quarterback behind him and he couldn’t get away from being vanilla.
“We had to be more conservative than we wanted to, even in the run game,” Brown admitted.
But Brown was itching to turn Greene loose.
“Early in the year we were having these drives that just took forever. While that’s good for time of possession and our defense not playing a whole lot, it’s hard because one negative play knocks you out. We feel we have some guys who can make explosive plays.
“Garrett’s got by far the most. Jaheim, CJ and Devin Carter has shown an ability, Kole Taylor has shown an ability but your young wideouts, those are the guys I’m excited about as we finish out the season and get into bowl prep … Traylon Ray, Hudson Clement, Rodney Gallagher. I’m excited to see how they finish up the next two games.”
The results are being seen now, as evidenced by the Cincinnati game.
“As we went through the season we got more comfortable with what Garrett could and could not do with what he sees in the read game and our running backs have made significant improvement,” Brown said.