Morgantown, West Virginia – The West Virginia Mountaineers’ offense is bad. We’re stale, vanilla and predictable. There are two abundantly clear ways to immediately fix and improve the West Virginia offense that has become embarrassingly easy to stop.
Hire a Proven Offensive Coordinator
No other team in college football has a head coach and an assistant with no offensive coordinator experience sharing the play-calling duties. Successful college football programs have an offensive coordinator whose primary responsibility is calling plays.
Neal Brown is a program builder. He’s a Head Coach. But he has absolutely no business calling offensive plays for the Mountaineers. Assistant coach Gerard Parker has no experience as an offensive coordinator. NONE. How is an assistant coach with no experience and a head coach with a thousand other responsibilities the most successful arrangement that West Virginia could come up with?
Clearly, this is a massively failed experiment and needs immediate attention. The obvious move is to hire a proven, historically successful offensive coordinator who has similar tendencies as Brown and allow him to have full control over the offense. There are many available offensive minds in the country that would make outstanding candidates for this position.
With a trusted, proven, experienced offensive coordinator in place, Brown would then be able to concentrate on all of the other various matters that a head coach has to deal with.
Play a Mobile Quarterback
Neal Brown’s offense is predicated on the Run Pass Option (RPO). The RPO is confusing for defenses because the quarterback can either hand the ball off to the running back, fake the hand-off and pass it, or fake the hand-off to the running back and keep the ball themselves for a run.
Jarret Doege is many things, but he is not particularly mobile and is incapable of being an effective player in this offense. Most successful college teams use a dual threat quarterback because as the phrase dual threat implies, they are a dual threat. Doege is only a threat to hand the ball off or to pass it, which significantly waters down the Run Pass Option.
Mobile quarterbacks can escape pressure and create plays when the pocket collapses and they have to make thing happen with their feet. Having a mobile quarterback is particularly important when a team has an average offensive line. A mobile quarterback adds a whole new dynamic to the West Virginia offense.
The only true dual threat quarterback on the West Virginia roster is freshman Garrett Greene, who played one game today against Iowa State and gained an easy 8 yards. While Neal Brown may not be ready to pull the trigger on inserting Greene as the starter, it’s time.
