Photo by: Liz Parke
Campus Connection – Innovative Coaching
July 19, 2019 03:43 PM | Football, Blog
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - If you study West Virginia's athletic history like I have, you will come to the realization that WVU's most successful programs – no matter the sport – have always done things a little bit differently than others.
In the late 1950s, it was basketball coach Fred Schaus borrowing Neal Baisi's zone press and surrounding Jerry West with a cast of athletic, aggressive players.
In the late 1960s, Jim Carlen brought a Southern style of football to the Northeast when all of the teams up here were big, powerful and mostly slow, the exception, of course, being Penn State.
In the early 1980s, Don Nehlen began heavily recruiting Florida when few other programs outside the Sunshine State were doing so, or Nehlen's successor Rich Rodriguez employing a zone-read offense that was predicated on running the football out of the shotgun.
Rich Rod then recruited the right pieces to fit his system – the most important one being Alabama quarterback Pat White.
There was John Beilen's twist on the Princeton motion offense that capitalized on 6-foot-11 shooting center Kevin Pittsnogle, or, more recently, Bob Huggins revitalizing Mountaineer basketball with "Press Virginia" a few years ago.
Even women's soccer's Nikki Izzo-Brown was innovative in her approach to recruiting Canadians, and those Canadian harvests eventually led to the Mountaineers reaching the national championship game in 2016.
So, I was excited to learn recently that current West Virginia coach Neal Brown's recruiting pursuits will now also include Europe, which has been largely untapped by U.S. football programs up to this point.
Like WVU's other highly successful coaches through the years, Brown appears to be embracing out-of-the-box solutions.
And that's really been West Virginia's secret sauce of success for decades in all sports.
"We're going to be creative in how we build our roster, and we're going to explore every way possible to put together a team that hopefully at the end of the day that can end up (in the Big 12 championship game)," Brown said Tuesday at Big 12 media day in Arlington, Texas.
His interest in European football players was really born out of a relationship he had developed with fellow UMass graduate Brandon Collier.
"It goes back to connections," Brown explained. "There's a guy named Brandon Collier who is overseas now and he's a UMass grad like myself. We've got something in common there. He's younger than I am so we never played together, but he's done a great job. We're always looking forward to what's next. We want to be different.
West Virginia's first-year coach has already had a chance to see and evaluate a number of European players, and he likes what he's seen so far.
"They did a really good job," he said. "I was not only impressed with their athletic ability but also how they competed and their overall football knowledge. That's something we're going to continue to explore, not only internationally, but Canada as well."
It's different.
And I like it … a lot.
More Summertime WVU Sports Notes …
* The Athletic recently made an eye-raising acquisition when it pried talented local sportswriter Allan Taylor away from WV Metro News to cover West Virginia University sports.
Since its launch in January 2016, The Athletic has been adding some of the best sportswriters in college and professional sports to its online roster, and what makes Taylor joining The Athletic so noteworthy is that only two other Big 12 programs are currently covered by The Athletic – Texas and Oklahoma.
This clearly demonstrates how valuable West Virginia's rabid fan base in the eyes of those in the media business.
I can think of a certain school located, oh, about 77 miles to the North that would LOVE to have The Athletic covering its football and basketball programs.
Yes, this is a much, much different West Virginia University than the one your parents attended decades ago, that's for sure!
* Regarding our old friends up North, have you had a chance to listen to the new radio advertisement begging Pittsburgh sports viewers to call their local cable companies and demand (not ask) that the ACC Network be added to local sports lineup?
If I am not mistaken, don't the Panthers open the 2019 season against Virginia on the ACC Network?
Wouldn't that be something if nobody in Pittsburgh is able to watch that game?
I know something like that wouldn't go over too well down here in West Virginia, that's for sure!
* Kudos to West Virginia's talented (and ever expanding digital media team) for its recent social media successes. The latest mention comes from Street & Smith's College Football Magazine, which listed @WVUfootball as the best twitter account in the Big 12 in this year's preview edition.
"The Mountaineers' PR folks do an excellent job with photos and updates," the magazine wrote.
Yes they do!
Also, I just saw where Mountaineer football's Facebook page finished the month of June with the second-most interactions in the country behind only Michigan, according to SkullSparks an organization which tracks these things.
* Speaking of college football magazines, how often is it that you see an offensive lineman on a regional cover? Well, West Virginia senior offensive tackle Colton McKivitz is on the cover of this year's Athlon Sports, currently in newsstands throughout the region.
If you happen to live in the Ohio Valley you might have a difficult time finding it, however, because Colton told me earlier this week at Big 12 media day that his mother has been buying up every extra copy she can get her hands on!
Who can blame her?
* Earlier this week, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby announced the creation of a new digital network, Big 12 Now, which will launch later this fall. However, it's important for you to understand that West Virginia will not join the new digital network until next year. That means Mountaineer fans will get to continue to enjoy AT&T Sportsnet's outstanding Mountaineer sports coverage, beginning with football's season opener against James Madison on Saturday, Aug. 31.
* Randy Mazey's coaching tree continues to expand. Former WVU assistant coach Derek Matlock is doing great things at Texas-Rio Grande Valley where he won 34 games in his second season there last spring, and now former Mazey assistant Steven Trout is getting his first Division I baseball head coaching job at Texas State.
Congratulations Steven!
* How about this tweet put out by Schuyler Callihan earlier this week: WVU is the ONLY school to have 11 Power 5 (opponents) in each of the next six years?
Who can remember, prior to the 1988 season, when Beano Cook made waves by predicting on ESPN that West Virginia would win the national championship that year, primarily on the basis of its soft football schedule?
And Beano was almost on target, too!
By the way, next week's Campus Connection podcast will feature an exclusive with WVU director of athletics Shane Lyons on his football scheduling philosophy.
* And finally, our Matt Wells has been invited to attend this year's LEAD1Institute19 conference July 22-24 in Columbus, Ohio. LEAD1 represents the top professionals in college sports and is led by the Honorable Tom McMillen, according to its Twitter feed.
Incidentally, McMillen was a one-time recruiting target of Sonny Moran at West Virginia before he chose to play for Lefty Driesell at Maryland.
Getting back to Matt, his specialty at WVU, of course, is sponsorships, tickets and marketing.
Matt is part of the current senior leadership team in the WVU athletics department that includes Shane Lyons, chair of the NCAA Football Oversight Committee, and deputy director of athletics Keli Zinn, recently named to the prestigious Sports Business Journal's Forty Under 40 class for 2019.
That's a lot of brainpower walking the hallways of the WVU Coliseum, that's for sure!
Have a great weekend everyone!
In the late 1950s, it was basketball coach Fred Schaus borrowing Neal Baisi's zone press and surrounding Jerry West with a cast of athletic, aggressive players.
In the late 1960s, Jim Carlen brought a Southern style of football to the Northeast when all of the teams up here were big, powerful and mostly slow, the exception, of course, being Penn State.
In the early 1980s, Don Nehlen began heavily recruiting Florida when few other programs outside the Sunshine State were doing so, or Nehlen's successor Rich Rodriguez employing a zone-read offense that was predicated on running the football out of the shotgun.
Rich Rod then recruited the right pieces to fit his system – the most important one being Alabama quarterback Pat White.
There was John Beilen's twist on the Princeton motion offense that capitalized on 6-foot-11 shooting center Kevin Pittsnogle, or, more recently, Bob Huggins revitalizing Mountaineer basketball with "Press Virginia" a few years ago.
Even women's soccer's Nikki Izzo-Brown was innovative in her approach to recruiting Canadians, and those Canadian harvests eventually led to the Mountaineers reaching the national championship game in 2016.So, I was excited to learn recently that current West Virginia coach Neal Brown's recruiting pursuits will now also include Europe, which has been largely untapped by U.S. football programs up to this point.
Like WVU's other highly successful coaches through the years, Brown appears to be embracing out-of-the-box solutions.
And that's really been West Virginia's secret sauce of success for decades in all sports.
"We're going to be creative in how we build our roster, and we're going to explore every way possible to put together a team that hopefully at the end of the day that can end up (in the Big 12 championship game)," Brown said Tuesday at Big 12 media day in Arlington, Texas.
His interest in European football players was really born out of a relationship he had developed with fellow UMass graduate Brandon Collier.
"It goes back to connections," Brown explained. "There's a guy named Brandon Collier who is overseas now and he's a UMass grad like myself. We've got something in common there. He's younger than I am so we never played together, but he's done a great job. We're always looking forward to what's next. We want to be different.
West Virginia's first-year coach has already had a chance to see and evaluate a number of European players, and he likes what he's seen so far.
"They did a really good job," he said. "I was not only impressed with their athletic ability but also how they competed and their overall football knowledge. That's something we're going to continue to explore, not only internationally, but Canada as well."
It's different.
And I like it … a lot.
More Summertime WVU Sports Notes …
* The Athletic recently made an eye-raising acquisition when it pried talented local sportswriter Allan Taylor away from WV Metro News to cover West Virginia University sports.
Since its launch in January 2016, The Athletic has been adding some of the best sportswriters in college and professional sports to its online roster, and what makes Taylor joining The Athletic so noteworthy is that only two other Big 12 programs are currently covered by The Athletic – Texas and Oklahoma.
This clearly demonstrates how valuable West Virginia's rabid fan base in the eyes of those in the media business.
I can think of a certain school located, oh, about 77 miles to the North that would LOVE to have The Athletic covering its football and basketball programs.
Yes, this is a much, much different West Virginia University than the one your parents attended decades ago, that's for sure!
* Regarding our old friends up North, have you had a chance to listen to the new radio advertisement begging Pittsburgh sports viewers to call their local cable companies and demand (not ask) that the ACC Network be added to local sports lineup?
If I am not mistaken, don't the Panthers open the 2019 season against Virginia on the ACC Network?
Wouldn't that be something if nobody in Pittsburgh is able to watch that game?
I know something like that wouldn't go over too well down here in West Virginia, that's for sure!
* Kudos to West Virginia's talented (and ever expanding digital media team) for its recent social media successes. The latest mention comes from Street & Smith's College Football Magazine, which listed @WVUfootball as the best twitter account in the Big 12 in this year's preview edition.
"The Mountaineers' PR folks do an excellent job with photos and updates," the magazine wrote.
Yes they do!
Also, I just saw where Mountaineer football's Facebook page finished the month of June with the second-most interactions in the country behind only Michigan, according to SkullSparks an organization which tracks these things.
* Speaking of college football magazines, how often is it that you see an offensive lineman on a regional cover? Well, West Virginia senior offensive tackle Colton McKivitz is on the cover of this year's Athlon Sports, currently in newsstands throughout the region.If you happen to live in the Ohio Valley you might have a difficult time finding it, however, because Colton told me earlier this week at Big 12 media day that his mother has been buying up every extra copy she can get her hands on!
Who can blame her?
* Earlier this week, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby announced the creation of a new digital network, Big 12 Now, which will launch later this fall. However, it's important for you to understand that West Virginia will not join the new digital network until next year. That means Mountaineer fans will get to continue to enjoy AT&T Sportsnet's outstanding Mountaineer sports coverage, beginning with football's season opener against James Madison on Saturday, Aug. 31.
* Randy Mazey's coaching tree continues to expand. Former WVU assistant coach Derek Matlock is doing great things at Texas-Rio Grande Valley where he won 34 games in his second season there last spring, and now former Mazey assistant Steven Trout is getting his first Division I baseball head coaching job at Texas State.
Congratulations Steven!
* How about this tweet put out by Schuyler Callihan earlier this week: WVU is the ONLY school to have 11 Power 5 (opponents) in each of the next six years?
Who can remember, prior to the 1988 season, when Beano Cook made waves by predicting on ESPN that West Virginia would win the national championship that year, primarily on the basis of its soft football schedule?
And Beano was almost on target, too!
By the way, next week's Campus Connection podcast will feature an exclusive with WVU director of athletics Shane Lyons on his football scheduling philosophy.
* And finally, our Matt Wells has been invited to attend this year's LEAD1Institute19 conference July 22-24 in Columbus, Ohio. LEAD1 represents the top professionals in college sports and is led by the Honorable Tom McMillen, according to its Twitter feed.Incidentally, McMillen was a one-time recruiting target of Sonny Moran at West Virginia before he chose to play for Lefty Driesell at Maryland.
Getting back to Matt, his specialty at WVU, of course, is sponsorships, tickets and marketing.
Matt is part of the current senior leadership team in the WVU athletics department that includes Shane Lyons, chair of the NCAA Football Oversight Committee, and deputy director of athletics Keli Zinn, recently named to the prestigious Sports Business Journal's Forty Under 40 class for 2019.
That's a lot of brainpower walking the hallways of the WVU Coliseum, that's for sure!
Have a great weekend everyone!
Players Mentioned
OL
/ FootballScotty Fox Jr. | Nov. 1
Saturday, November 01
Diore Hubbard | Nov. 1
Saturday, November 01
Jordan Scruggs | Nov. 1
Saturday, November 01
Rich Rodriguez | Nov. 1
Saturday, November 01
