COMMENTARY
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — There are three types of people who remain unsold on Neal Brown after his first season at West Virginia: the cautious optimists, the skeptics, and the type of people who demand overwhelming mountains of evidence to believe commonly accepted events like the moon landing.
If you made a Venn diagram of those groups, there would be a very legitimate question at the center.
Can Neal Brown recruit at a Big 12 level?
The cautious optimists liked what they saw from Brown as a coach in Year 1, but rightfully didn’t know what to expect from him as a recruiter.
The skeptics are a group naturally wary of any new coach, especially one making a transition from a smaller school to the Power Five. They want proof, not promises.
The non-believers won’t be sold until the Mountaineers are lifting the Big 12 championship trophy.
All three groups are one step closer to appeasement following West Virginia’s signing day haul.
According to 247 Sports composite rankings of every program in the country, West Virginia has the 36th-best signing class in the country and the fourth-best in the Big 12.
The latter number is arguably the most significant. Every team in the Big 12 starts behind Texas and Oklahoma in recruiting. That’s the way it’s always been and the way it will always be.
No. 3 is the best spot any of the league’s other eight schools can realistically hope to be in. Only TCU, with its fertile recruiting radius and Gary Patterson’s two decades experience working with Texas high school coaches, was able to beat out West Virginia for that spot.
Even so, Brown believes he can do better. And he can.
The Mountaineers are still without a running back that they desperately need to add before the start of next season. And though he landed the top two players in West Virginia, he’d also like to improve WVU’s recruiting regionally. There are no Pennsylvanians in this class, for instance.
“A six-hour radius around Morgantown needs to be our primary recruiting area,” Brown said. “I thought we did an OK job. We have to continue to grow our brand and build relationships in these areas.”
While recruiting rankings aren’t foolproof by any means, they can often foretell what is to come to some degree. Every team in this year’s College Football Playoff has had at least one Top-10 class within the past three years.
2015 is the last time West Virginia brought in a class of this caliber.
That year the Mountaineers were fourth in the Big 12 and 35th nationally, and the talent Dana Holgorsen brought in with that class gives merit to those rankings — Ka’Raun White, Colton McKivitz, Gary Jennings, David Long, David Sills and Rasul Douglas were all in the Class of 2015.
Now Brown just has to do what Holgorsen could not and put a string of strong classes together.
Holgorsen brought in another good class in 2016 — fourth in the Big 12 and 39th nationally — but things dropped off from there. In 2017 the Mountaineers were eighth and 57th. In 2018, they were 35th nationally but only sixth in the league. Last year’s class rated seventh in the league and 47th overall.
Given that recruiting starts when players are sophomores and juniors in high school, there’s reason to believe Brown will do even better next year.
“I’m really pleased with the ’20 class,” Brown said. “I’m excited about what we can do as an organization in ’21 and beyond with an even field against everyone else where we’ve really got two full years invested in these guys.”
If this is, in fact, only the beginning of a new era for West Virginia football recruiting, the Mountaineers will be making serious noise in the Big 12 sooner rather than later.