The 3 E's caused WVU's losing season

To Neal Brown, West Virginia’s football coach, E has an entirely different meaning.

To him, E has come to represent what could stand between success and failure in the 2023 season, which could decide his career fate.

He says that three Es, relatively speaking, separated a winning season from the losing season it was in 2022. That, at least, is how he sold it to the media last week as he went over the state of his union.

Those three Es represented errors, efficiency and explosive plays, all of which were below critical mass during a 5-7 season in which the Mountaineers were at the bottom of the Big 12 and missed out on bowl play.

Errors ... Efficiency ... Explosive Plays.

Trying to win without improving in those three areas is like trying to bake a cake without an oven.

Before we get into those areas of critical concern, Brown offered up some background on how the team reached the point it is at today. It was a much too brief synopsis, of course, for it would require volumes to trace back through how everything that could go wrong went wrong.

Blame what you will — COVID, rule changes, defections, bad coaching, officiating. Doesn’t really matter because you can’t rewrite the past. You can change what the future may hold, but the past is etched in stone.

“I felt like we underachieved on the offensive side of the ball last year,” Brown said. “When we got here in January of ’19, it was brand new, and we knew it would be a little bit of a process on offense. We made a decision — and if I had to do it all over again, I’d make the same decision.

“We were going to go young on the offensive line and have young receivers who we hoped to develop,” Brown continued. “We really took some lumps during the developmental process as we worked with the O-line in 2019-20 and while we were growing with the youth at receiver.

“Last fall was really the point where I felt really good about our personnel from an experience and talent level so that we could compete week-in and week-out against the top of our league ... and we just didn’t do that.

“We didn’t give ourselves enough chances.”

That, his analysis showed, came down to those three Es — errors, efficiency and explosive plays, or the lack thereof.

“We’ve got to eliminate the errors — too many turnovers and too many penalties on the offensive side of the ball,” Brown explained. “Several of those were at critical times.”

Think back to the false starts, the interceptions, the fumbles and timing of them. Think how they kept WVU fighting an uphill battle all season on offense.

“We’ve got to be able to clean those up,” Brown said.

The bookkeeping looks something like this:

There were 77 penalties committed and accepted for 63 yards, ranking in the lower half of the NCAA and not what’s expected of what by last year had become an experienced offense. There were 18 turnovers (12 INTs, 6 fumbles lost), which is 1.5 per game, which was 55th in the nation.

The second area of concern was efficiency.

“We’ve got to be more efficient (on our first play in a series) and then on third-and-medium,” Brown said.

This isn’t the highlight reel stuff. It’s breaking a tackle that turns a second and 9 into a second and 5. It’s making a block on a blitzing backer on third and 6 that allows a first-down completion.

It’s little stuff compared to the third E — explosive plays.

“We regressed in that,” Brown said. “We had been kind of steadily building but we regressed a year ago.”

He said that in 2020 they recorded 50 plays that qualified as explosive in just 10 games due to COVID, had 58 in 2021 when they had a full season and a bowl game but last year were at just 50 explosive plays, not at all what you would expect with JT Daniels at quarterback, a high profile offensive coordinator, the addition of JD Donaldson at running back and what seemed to be potentially dangerous deep receivers.

“Last fall was really the first point where I felt really good about our offensive personnel from an experience and talent level, where I felt we could compete week in and week out against the top of our league,” Brown said.

“We just didn’t do that. We didn’t give ourselves enough chances.”