Brandon Myles was the perfect example of a developmental player who blossomed when he got his opportunity to shine.

 

Myles, a 6-foot-3, 185-pound wide receiver from Goochland, Virginia, spent a season playing behind Chris Henry in 2004 before Henry chose to forgo his senior season in 2005 and enter the NFL draft. Lock-down cover corner Pacman Jones also departed early, robbing West Virginia of its two most explosive playmakers on both sides of the football.

 

Those two key losses and Coach Rich Rodriguez’s inability to choose between quarterbacks Adam Bednarik and Pat White tempered people’s expectations heading into the 2005 season.

 

“We lost a lot of guys like Pacman and Chris and a lot of people didn’t expect us to go 11-1,” Myles recalled recently. “I think everybody thought we were going to be like a .500 team because we didn’t have a lot of name players returning – we had a lot of doubters.”

 

What made the 2005 team so special wasn’t the name on the back of their jerseys, but rather the name on the front of them.

 

Myles was one of those unknown program players who stepped up and accepted the challenge of getting the Mountaineers over the hump. In the early 2000s West Virginia had sort of fallen into a pattern of winning some early games before floundering late in the season.

 

West Virginia did that in 2003 after running the table late in the year, getting blown out by Maryland in the 2004 Gator Bowl.

 

WVU was in line for even bigger things in 2004 when the Mountaineers jumped out to an 8-1 start and climbed to No. 13 in the national rankings, but then they absorbed season-ending losses to Boston College and Pitt, costing West Virginia a chance at a BCS bowl appearance. An eight-win Pitt team went instead and got whacked by Utah in the Fiesta Bowl, while a much stronger West Virginia team was forced to play in the Gator Bowl once again.

 

A year later, with most of its big-name players gone from that underachieving 2004 team, and upstart Louisville joining the Big East, most of the attention was focused on the Cardinals entering the season, Myles recalled.

 

“I remember having a good conversation with (wide receiver) Rayshawn Bolden before the season started and I remember telling him that I thought we were a lot better than people were giving us credit for,” said Myles. “We had a lot of guys that had been in the program two or three years, we just didn’t have any star names that everybody knew.”

 

Steve Slaton and Owen Schmitt emerged midway through the season as West Virginia’s big-play threats in the backfield, while freshman quarterback Pat White came of age during the triple-overtime victory over Louisville.

 

Myles’ development that year was not nearly as pronounced, but rather a steady and consistent progression from the opening game on. He led the team that year with 34 catches for 536 yards and three touchdowns, averaging 15.8 yards per catch.

 

“At first, all of the pieces didn’t come together but once they did we just had to get the timing down and it went from there and everything started clicking,” said Myles.

 

Myles wasn’t in Henry’s league in terms of athleticism, speed or sheer playmaking ability, but he was just enough of a downfield threat to force defenses to cover the entire field.

 

“The beauty of that scheme at that time was everybody was solid enough or could make a play big enough to keep defenses honest,” said Schmitt. “That’s all you ever want.”

 

“When you are trying to formulate a game plan to stop Pat White, having the ability to stretch the field really helps,’’ added offensive lineman Ryan Stanchek, now an assistant coach at Alcorn State.

 

Myles wasn’t on the receiving end of a whole bunch of passes that year, but the ones he did catch were usually good enough to keep the sticks moving on third down.

 

“I think everybody knew if it was a third and long I was probably getting the ball so I had to make the best of my opportunities when the ball was thrown to me.”

 

He caught five passes for 76 yards against Syracuse in the season opener, and his 10-yard touchdown reception provided the winning margin in a 20-15 victory over East Carolina in a late September game in Morgantown. He also caught important touchdown passes in victories over Rutgers and Connecticut.

 

Myles didn’t get into the end zone against Georgia in the 2006 Nokia Sugar Bowl, but he did make four critical catches for 64 yards in the Mountaineers’ 38-35 victory – one that will forever be talked about in the Mountain State.

 

“That was probably one of the biggest games because we had never won a BCS game before and it started a trend of us winning those types of games,” said Myles.

 

What made that team so special, according to Myles, was the chemistry it had on and off the field.

 

“Everybody was there for everybody,” he said. “We had a workmanlike mentality and we had good results because we put all of the hard work in the summer and the fall.”

 

Speaking of hard work, Myles continues to put in his fair amount of time on the football field as an assistant strength coach on Butch Jones’ Tennessee staff. Jones was Myles’ position coach at WVU and Myles remained with him, first at Central Michigan and then when Jones was hired at Cincinnati.

 

“Everything is going great down here and we’re just ready to get training camp started,” said Myles.

 

Myles said the Volunteer players he’s working with right now know very little about his collegiate career a decade ago.

 

“Most of them are so young,” he said. “They were in middle school or sixth grade when I played so they only remember it a little bit. They will look you up and see what you did and some of your plays on YouTube.”

 

When they do that, what they will discover is a very hard worker who turned himself into an excellent college football player on one of the greatest teams in West Virginia University history.

 

“The thing about Coach Rodriguez was he was always really good about telling us to just keep fighting and never give up and that was our whole mentality as a team,” said Myles. “I just felt like every time we stepped on the field at Mountaineer Field we were not going to lose the game.”

 

In 2005, that almost turned out to be the case, the Mountaineers winning them all but one in what will always be remembered as one of the greatest seasons in school history.