While the offseason hype leading into FOX’s Big Noon kickoff game primarily centered on the West Virginia Mountaineers‘ ability to pull off an early upset against Penn State, that was not the case on Saturday.
During the tough outing, Neal Brown and company struggled to deal with one interesting detail revealed in a Monday press conference.
According to Brown, the Mountaineers’ in-helmet communication system went down early in the matchup, which forced the team to abandon its initial game plan.
“We went to it after we took that,” Brown said. “So, if you look at that play, that was in the third series. So, the first series of the game, I think we went six plays. My mind’s working right. We went six plays and we had a couple where the play clock, in full transparency, our coach-to-player [communication] didn’t work the first series.”
“It went out, and I don’t know what the case was, but we didn’t have our coach-to-player,” Brown continued. “So, we were going to huddle the whole time, but because the coach-to-player went out, we didn’t. So, we had some issues there. First play after the turnover, we motioned. Garrett asked for the ball late. Ball hits him. Next play, we’re going to run a running play because defensively we still got a stop after that. It was still 0-0. We get the ball back. Very next play is a motion play. We’re gonna run the ball…that ball goes boom, off. It was a really hard snap.”
While the entirety of the blame shouldn’t be placed on the error, the lack of in-helmet communication between the West Virginia sidelines and blank quarterback Garrett Greene contributed to the Mountaineers’ early nerves. The team played stiff and shaky in the first half before entering an incredibly long weather delay.
“So, at that point, I went off our opening script and just went to some very standard plays, really into that, or we went to some motions that aren’t affected by the snap…we got away from those until later…we went back to them later and it was after Garrett had settled down a little bit.”
Despite coming off of an incredible 2023 season, Greene struggled against the Nittany Lions in Week 1. The Florida native posted a stat line of 15-28 for 161 yards and zero scores in his 2023 debut, which shocked most West Virginia fans.
Brown finished his thoughts by saying, “We did it more than we were planning on. We wanted to play with some tempo vs. those guys because they wanted to match personnel. So, when they went to their big sets, we wanted to play open…but to play fast, you’ve got to still use signals. Then, there are some times when you’re going to huddle. When you huddle, you don’t need signals. So, you’ve got to have plans for a rainy day, AKA the system goes out. So, you’ve got to have the signals still.”
The Mountaineers have a much more favorable matchup in Week 2 against UAlbany and will kick off their game on Saturday, September 7th, at 5:00 p.m. CT.
