Neal Brown breaks down how West Virginia built roster entering 2024

West Virginia is coming off its best season yet under fifth-year coach Neal Brown, a 9-4 campaign that was capped by a win in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl against North Carolina.

Brown has been slowly building, and he’s seen this developing for quite some time. It took a while for everything to get organized in the new era of NIL, which cost West Virginia initially.

“If you go in reverse, kind of where we were after our bowl game, we lose the Guaranteed Rate Bowl to Minnesota, who was better than us, at the end of the ’21 season,” Brown said on the Andy Staples On3 show. “And we just didn’t have the necessary things in place to hold onto our players.”

Fast forward a few years and Brown thinks that has changed at this point.

“Now we do. Our collective, the Country Roads Trust, we’ve done a really good job of raising money,” Neal Brown said. “I think that it’s very well run. It’s backed. And we’ve got a really good plan and they’ve got a really good plan. So that’s kind of changed and allowed us to retain. That’s been a big piece of it.”

Able to keep more talent on the roster, West Virginia should be capable of competing more and more in the Big 12. And with Oklahoma and Texas departing, the league looks as wide open as ever heading into 2024.

More than anything, though, Brown just appears to have found his comfort zone in the program.

“I also think, Andy, is we’ve figured out kind of what’s the best path forward in this new era of college football for West Virginia,” Neal Brown said. “And really for us it’s about out-evaluating and signing really good fits for us out of the high schools and developing those guys and then retaining those guys.”

Neal Brown breaks down NIL setup

Brown was remarkably candid on the Andy Staples On3 show about how his organization and its collective have organized things in terms of deal-making with players.

“From a what guys are earning coming out of high school the first year, we’ve put not as much emphasis on that and more emphasis on the retention of the guys that have been here in our program and produced,” Neal Brown said. “So I think the collective, changing how we think about retention.”

The other factor is that the program has diverted more resources toward the player experience, attempting to keep them out of the transfer portal.

“We’ve really put an emphasis on making sure our guys have a great experience,” Neal Brown said. “We’ve heavily invested in nutrition, we’ve heavily invested in recovery. We’ve heavily invested in things that are maybe unique and different to us, and it’s worked. We’ve done a great job from a relationship standpoint. That’s not the only thing that matters. That used to be one of the real decision-makers of transfers. That’s not always the No. 1, but it still matters.”

Now firmly established at West Virginia, the only thing that’s left for Brown is to wait for the results to trickle in.