Neal Brown shares West Virginia helmet communication was down early vs. Penn State

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The new in-helmet communication was an issue for West Virginia in their loss against Penn State on Saturday, with head coach Neal Brown explaining that it wasn’t working early in the Week 1 matchup for the Mountaineers.

Brown explained that communication was an issue early in the game and it forced the Mountaineers to go off their initial gameplan. That included going away from motions before the snap after a pair of bad snaps came on them.

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“We went to it after we took that,” Neal Brown said. “So, if you look at that play, that was in the third series. So, the first series of the game I think we went six plays. My mind’s working right. We went six plays and we had a couple where the play clock — in full transparency, our coach-to-player [communication] didn’t work the first series.”

The coach-to-player communication is new this year and it allows the coach to communicate with one player, typically the quarterback on offense, up to 15 seconds before the snap. That allows for some changes in how a team operates.

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When those in-helmet communications went out, it forced West Virginia to adapt. That included doing things like not going to a huddle and using hand signals.

“It went out, and I don’t know what the case was but we didn’t have our coach-to-player. So, we were gonna huddle the whole time but because the coach-to-player went out, we didn’t. So, we had some issues there.”

Certainly, the West Virginia offense struggled early in the game. Part of that can be attributed to first-game anxiety and the talented Penn State defense. Another part is likely related to those communication issues.

“First play after the turnover, we motioned. Garrett asked for the ball late. Ball hits him. Next play, we’re gonna run a running play because defensively we still got a stop after that. It was still 0-0. We get the ball back. Very next play is a motion play. We’re gonna run the ball…that ball goes boom, off. It was a really hard snap,” Brown said.

“So, at that point, I went off our opening script and just went to some very standard plays, really into that or we went to some motions that aren’t affected by the snap…we got away from those until later…we went back to them later and it was after Garrett had settled down a little bit.”

This also forced Neal Brown and West Virginia to use hand signals more than they initially planned, though they had been prepared to use those signals in the right occasions.

“We did it more than we were planning on. We wanted to play with some tempo vs. those guys because they wanted to match personnel. So, when they went to their their big sets, we wanted to play open…but to play fast you’ve got to still use signals. Okay,” Brown said. “Then, there’s some times when you’re gonna huddle. When you huddle, you don’t need signals. So, you’ve got to have plans for a rainy day, AKA the system goes out. So, you’ve got to still have the signals.”

West Virginia is going to hope to have an easier time communicating on Saturday when the Mountaineers host Albany.