MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Neal Brown leans forward in his chair, which might as well be a soapbox.

“I’ll tell you, this is a unique area for food because there is a ton of Italian influence here,” Brown says.

In the early 1900s, tens of thousands of Italians immigrated to West Virginia to work in the state’s rapidly growing steel and coal industries, bringing that home cooking with them.

“So there are some great, old-school Italian American restaurants down in Clarksburg and Fairmont just south of here,” Brown says. “But people don’t realize that. It gets overlooked.”

He sits back, hands interlocked behind his head. The history lesson is done, but Brown’s not. Because the head coach of West Virginia just so happens to feel the same way about his football team.

“I just think our best players are being undervalued,” Brown says. “The amount of production we have coming back and what we’ve added, it’s significantly better than where people have us in preseason.”

Coming off an unexpected 9-4 record in 2023 and entering his sixth season there, West Virginia was picked seventh in the Big 12 preseason poll and landed just outside the initial AP Top 25 rankings. Brown says folks are once again sleeping on the Mountaineers, a mentality that dates to more than a year ago, when he sat down in front of a Big 12 media days contingent that voted WVU dead last in the preseason poll.

“I can guarantee you that we’re not going to finish last,” Brown said last summer. “We’re looking forward to proving everybody wrong.”

Scoreboard. WVU tied for third in the Big 12 standings and remained in the conference-title race until the final weeks, ending the year with a bucket of mayonnaise dumped over Brown’s head after routing North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. Brown went from a scorching-hot seat to vindicated, earning a one-year contract extension through 2027. It gave the 44-year-old an opportunity to bet on himself yet again.

Brown signed the extension in March. And a voluntary pay cut.

“You can talk about selflessness and being a good teammate all you want to, but you also have to show those things,” he says. “You should have win-wins. I think it was good business for both sides. I like it here.”

As part of the extension, Brown essentially forwent $400,000 in salary increases over the next three years of his contract, electing to reinvest that money in his staff. All eight of WVU’s returning assistant coaches received raises, including coordinators Chad Scott (offense) and Jordan Lesley (defense), as did numerous support staffers.

Brown’s $4 million salary in 2024 ranks in the middle among conference head coaches. Between the pay cut and an additional bump from the university, more than $700,000 was added to the staff salary pool for the upcoming season, with additional flexibility for the future.

“I tried to talk him out of the pay-cut piece, to be honest. I was worried that people wouldn’t believe he did it voluntarily,” WVU athletic director Wren Baker says. “It’s highly unusual for a coach to do that, but I think he wanted to invest in those around him.”

There was no posturing. Brown’s reputation as a pragmatic and analytical thinker precedes him, a badge from his days as an innovative Air Raid disciple and offensive coordinator at Texas Tech and Kentucky, followed by a successful head coaching stint at Troy. He knows that if WVU can continue the momentum of last season and can be in the mix for a Big 12 title and the expanded College Football Playoff, West Virginia will reverse that pay cut and then some. He has reason to be confident in that outlook. Aided by the recent growth of the Country Roads Trust NIL collective, which has helped recruit and retain talent, Brown has the deepest and most experienced roster of his tenure — starting with quarterback Garrett Greene.

“If you put up Garrett’s numbers in terms of key stats and win-loss record, he’s going to be near the top of our league,” Brown says. “But he’s not getting talked about that way.”

The fifth-year senior threw for 2,406 yards and 16 touchdowns in his first year as a full-time starter in 2023, finishing sixth in the Big 12 in QB rating (142.2), fifth in yards per attempt (8.7) and with only four interceptions, the fewest among qualified passers. But his dual-threat capabilities set him apart, leading all Big 12 quarterbacks with 772 rushing yards and another 13 touchdowns.

It gave WVU a triple dipper in the backfield alongside running backs CJ Donaldson Jr. (798 yds, 11 TDs) and Jahiem White (842 yds, 4 TDs), combining for the best rushing attack in the conference and fourth-best in FBS at 229 yards per game. All three are back in 2024 behind an offensive line with three full-time returning starters, led by preseason All-America left tackle Wyatt Milum — another overlooked player who Brown believes will be a first-round NFL Draft pick next spring.

“He hasn’t given up a sack in two years and he didn’t even make the all-conference team last year,” Brown says.

The offense wasn’t pure ground and pound. WVU had 34 plays of 30-plus yards last season, tied for fifth in the Big 12. The biggest issue was efficiency. West Virginia scored touchdowns on 60.3 percent of red zone trips in 2023 (eighth in the Big 12), and Greene completed only 53 percent of his throws, lowest among the league’s qualified passers.

“He’s better than that,” Brown says. “We’ve worked hard to change his fundamentals.”

An older and replenished group of receivers should help. Hudson Clement, Preston Fox, Traylon Ray and tight end Kole Taylor are back, and WVU added a pair of power-conference transfers in Jaden Bray (Oklahoma State) and Justin Robinson (Mississippi State).

Up front defensively, Brown expects linemen Sean Martin and Tyrin Bradley Jr. to take leaps and Ty French (Gardner-Webb) and T.J. Jackson (Troy) to bolster the rotation. The questions are in the secondary, where all-conference safety Aubrey Burks and transfer corner Garnett Hollis Jr. (Northwestern) will lead a revamped group.

“This is the most talent we’ve had in the secondary, but they have to be able to mesh together,” Brown says.

The 2024 schedule doesn’t do the Mountaineers many favors, with nonconference games against Penn State and Pitt and a grueling five-game stretch to open league play: Kansas, at Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Kansas State, at Arizona. But in a new-look, 16-team Big 12 that expects plenty of parity, West Virginia has as much of a path to the top as anyone — a journey two years in the making.

🗓️ 2024 West Virginia Football Schedule#HailWV pic.twitter.com/1oBhlJwlAT

— West Virginia Football (@WVUfootball) January 30, 2024

Coming off a disappointing 5-7 2022 campaign and with Texas and Oklahoma on their way out the door, Brown hit the reset button on his team’s identity, homing in on discipline, effort and taking care of the football over raw talent, and turning those intangibles into tangibles. WVU saw marked improvement in penalties and turnover margin in 2023 after ranking last in the Big 12 in both the year before.

In a suddenly wide-open conference, with a first-round Playoff bye at stake, that attention to detail can reverberate.

“The talent disparity from team one to 16 in our league is not this drastic gap like there is in other leagues,” Brown says. “So many games come down to the fourth quarter. Your margins are small, so we have to be really good situationally.”

The make-your-own-luck mindset is particularly crucial at West Virginia, where geographical and financial challenges are baked in. It’s one of the reasons Baker opted for patience when he was hired in November 2022, just as the Mountaineers wrapped up a second straight losing season and public perception of Brown was cratering. Baker assessed a head coach who still had the respect and support of his staff and the locker room, as well as being someone who understood the proud tradition of a place that has always done a little more with a little less.

Wren Baker, left, chose patience regarding Neal Brown after becoming West Virginia’s AD. (Ben Queen / USA Today)

“The longer you’re in a job, the better you recognize what works,” Brown says. “We’ve done a better job of understanding our location and the type of personalities and players that can be successful here. I think it’s carried over.”

Baker, like many athletic directors, has plenty of big-picture items crowding his desk. There is the widening financial and competitive gap between the top of the Big Ten and SEC and schools like West Virginia, whose $106 million athletics budget in fiscal year 2023 was in the bottom half of the Big 12. There are the strains of a conference that now stretches 900 miles south and 2,000 miles west of Morgantown. There is the pending House v. NCAA settlement that stands to reorient college sports, including the burden of an additional $20-plus million in annual revenue sharing that Baker is determined WVU will fully participate in.

All of it can make the future seem murky at best. But the intriguing subplot of a league without Texas and Oklahoma is a relatively level financial playing field for the new Big 12. Conference title runs and Playoff bids are now much more attainable for a Mountaineers program that hasn’t won a league championship since joining the Big 12 in 2012.

And it’s not lost on Baker that the little things have put Brown and WVU in position to seize those opportunities — in 2024 and beyond.

“West Virginia is very much a fit job. Not just anyone can come in here and win, particularly in football,” Baker says. “Coach Brown and his staff have done a good job of focusing on what they can control. Eventually, I believe the scoreboard metric catches up to that.”

(Top photo: Ben Queen / USA Today)