WVU Fighting For Recognition In A Media-Driven Sports Landscape | News, Sports, Jobs

West Virginia quarterback Garrett Greene runs past North Carolina defensive back Kaleb Cost during the first half of an NCAA college football game at the Duke’s Mayo Bowl Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023, in Charlotte, N.C. As a junior Greene emerged as a solid dual threat in his first full season as a starter. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File)

MORGANTOWN – On Tuesday afternoon the Big 12 (plus 4) announced its preseason football media poll and its preseason all-conference team and it came out with the West Virginia Mountaineers firmly entrenched in the middle of the pack.

WVU was seventh in the team voting in a league where five schools received first-place votes, the Mountaineers not among them. At the same time only one WVU player – offensive tackle Wyatt Milum – was designated a pre-season all-conference player.

The situation was reflective of WVU’s place in the college football hierarchy, neither penthouse nor skid row.

While it has won 781 all-time football games and 15 league titles and has six times finished within the sports Top Ten, it has no national championships.

As the sport has dived head first into a new era of the game in which the most dominant schools reside in the SEC and Big Ten, they are in a conference that is a notch below that.

Their two marquee franchises – Oklahoma and Texas – shifted to the SEC this year while the conference has loaded up with the likes of Utah and Arizona, Houston and BYU, Colorado and Arizona State.

These are respected programs, suited more for ESPN than ESPN+, but also more for noon games than prime time.

And, if we may note, neither national championships nor Heisman Trophies are won on ESPN+ or at high noon.

Branding is more important that ever and historically WVU has a leader in finding ways to create its own brand, be it through the use of its Mountaineer mascot, it’s “Country Roads” school song, or its ability to create such awareness that a center in Zach Frazier, who at many schools might gain neither acclaim nor notoriety due to the anonymity of position which he plays.

He, instead, was promoted heavily and lived up to the promotion as he earned All-American honors through his career and was a second-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

In this age of professionalism, in what had always been listed as an “amateur” sport, branding has become nearly as important as recruiting.

Recognition rules in recruiting and the ability to draw an audience in person and on television create an aura of importance not only for the football program but for the school itself.

As WVU, the school, battles a financial problem that has led to cut majors and a loss of students, the athletic program has to cast the school in a positive light. Television ratings may be more important than national rankings in the overall scheme of things and a bounce back last year by the football program had to have helped offset some of the damage done by the Bob Huggins basketball debacle.

Neal Brown is a modern era coach who recognizes that X’s and O’s are as important in the word exposure as they are in his football playbook and that the responsibility of a coach in this era has changed dramatically.

The ability to remain in a Power 4 conference has been crucial to the WVU athletic department. Being there is only half the battle, though. You must succeed.

“We play a schedule where we are on national television a lot, so they get exposure but when you get it you have to be productive. The thing that’s difficult about whether it’s all-league teams, All-America teams, is the quality of people that are choosing them.”

Seventh place and one all-conference player is not enough, even though the league has expanded to 16 teams, making competition even tougher for recognition as a team and as an individual.

“The head coach’s job has changed so much. The All-Big 12 team now, Mike (Montoro, the football sports information guru) and I take it seriously. We take it into a staff meeting – you can’t vote for your own players. My personnel department, myself, Mike … we do a good job of narrowing it down,” he said.

“We have a lengthy staff meeting. I think it’s important. I think it’s the right thing to do. I’m not sure everyone does that.”

Think of it this way. With all the effort Brown and his staff put into it, they had only one All-Big 12 choice in Milum while Oklahoma State and Arizona had five players cited, Utah and Colorado 3.

At the five time, five teams – Baylor, BYU, TCU, Houston, Arizona State and, somehow, Kansas State, who was picked as the preseason runner-up to Arizona – had no players put on the team.

Brown understands that people voting on these things, especially All-American, have a problem following it because the airwaves are saturated with games every weekend from Thursday sometimes through Monday.

He was baffled last year that his offensive line, anchored by Frazier and with Milum a key part of it, weren’t given any real consideration for the Joe Moore Award given to the best offensive line in the country.

“It’s a travesty that our offensive line from a year ago wasn’t recognized in the top five,” Brown said. “We were the No. 1 Power 5 rushing attack in the country. We had one of the fewest sack totals allowed in the country,” he said.

“Should we have been No. 1? I don’t know but we should have been in the Top 5.”

Now Brown isn’t blaming himself for that.

“I don’t necessarily feel a responsibility, but I think it’s my job to speak for our guys,” he said. “I think Garrett Greene (WVU’s starting quarterback) is being undervalued in our league and nationally.”

Greene isn’t the traditional quarterback that wins Heisman Trophies. He’s somewhere around 6-foot, his passing hasn’t been as accurate as you would want, but he has a big play arm and big play mentality and blends it with a burst of speed and elusiveness that makes him the ultimate dual threat QB that now is the rage in both he college and professional games.

So, rest assured that Greene will be the subject of conversation often in Brown’s press briefings.

On the basketball side, for all the grief that interim coach Josh Eilert had to suffer through, he did make RaeQuan Battle a national figure as he fought for his right to play.

And baseball’s retiring coach Randy Mazey took it upon himself to keep his injured star JJ Wetherholt front and center, even late in the season at one point noting that despite the fact Wetherholt not being chosen for the press conference after a hitless game, that his mere presence in the lineup had the power to affect the outcome of the affair.