(Photo via WVU Football Twitter)
The West Virginia Mountaineer football team held a scrimmage on Saturday in front of the press at Milan Puskar Stadium. Head Coach Neal Brown spoke with the media following, and gave some insight as to where the team is right now.
As expected, Brown spoke about the quarterback competition. Both Garrett Greene and Nicco Marchiol split reps with the first and second team, and both received praise from the head man.
However, despite the praise, only one signal-caller seemed to be on the wrong end of criticism from Brown – that being Garrett Greene.
Here is what Neal Brown had to say about Greene’s performance on Saturday:
“He made a couple mistakes on third down. Gotta have some situational awareness. Gotta have field awareness. where he’s at. Took a sack where he probably shouldn’t have. But some explosive plays. Scrambled around and did some nice things too on broken plays.”
While this may not seem like a big deal, what Brown had to say about Marchiol is the exact opposite. The Arizona native’s decision making was praised, as was his lack of mistakes:
“Nicco had two nice drives, and what I mean by that is he converted multiple third downs. And we forget he’s in his second spring, he’s a redshirt freshman. He’s right in the middle of this thing, but he’s young. Today I just thought he made the simple decisions. A lot of times in football it’s just not getting yourself beat. On those two drives, especially early in practice, he just made good decisions. If it was a handoff, he handed it off. Third down completions, not taking sacks, just did a nice job in showing some maturation there.”
If you have paid any attention to Neal Brown’s handling of the quarterback situation during his time in Morgantown, you would know that this is not uncommon. Brown has regularly been harder on Greene than his other starting quarterbacks (Doege and Daniels). But this being the first time that Greene has a legitimate shot in a competition, it appears Brown’s feelings haven’t changed about him.
Reading into the comments, Brown is obviously favoring Nicco Marchiol in the quarterback competitiont. With his signal-callers, a player is likely to receive the nod from Brown if he is doing everything by the script. Greene is a player that likes to go off script, and unfortunately, it appears that it is going to hurt him again.
Mountaineer fans will have their first opportunity to see the 2023 team next Saturday. The Gold-Blue Spring Game will be held at Milan Puskar Stadium with a 1 p.m. kickoff time.
