Neal Brown saw Garrett Greene's potential at a young age

The kid’s name was Garrett Greene.

“There’s two things that stuck out to me when he came to our camp,” Brown began on Tuesday afternoon following spring practice, Day 2. “No. 1, for a kid who probably weighed 140, 145 pounds, the ball just jumped out his hand.”

It was eye opening, sort of like watching Roberto Clemente throw a runner out at third from right field in old Forbes Field.

In those days, Greene was dreaming of being more like Clemente than Patrick Mahomes, admitting that “baseball is my first love.”

Brown lined the camp participants up for a drill they always did, throwing an out pattern from one hash mark to the other.

No sweat. “He did it with ease,” Brown said.

But there was more than just that arm.

“The other thing, too, is he had contagious energy and bounced around,” Brown said. “There are energy givers and energy takers. He is an energy giver. You feel better being around him. He has a good vibe about himself. He smiles a lot. He has great energy.

“So when he initially came to the camp you could tell he had this aura about him and natural leadership skills and positive energy.”

That stayed with him. It wasn’t much later he offered him a scholarship when Greene was just a sophomore.

“I think our relationship is special,” Greene said in a press conference that just preceded Brown’s.

Brown, of course, is now West Virginia’s head coach, fresh off a nine-win season, armed with a contract extension.

Greene is his quarterback and he actually has become the hot quarterback talked about in the off-season, based on his play through the second half of that season.

What are we talking about when we talk about the relationship between a coach and quarterback?

We’re talking about trust. We’re talking about honesty. We’re talking about friendship.

How does it play out?

Let’s go back to last December, WVU had beaten North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, 30-10, and Greene was the MVP, leading the Mountaineers in rushing with 64 yards and throwning for 228 yards and a touchdown.

“Maybe a day or two later he texts me,” Brown said.

“I didn’t play very well,” he texted.

Brown texted him back succinctly: “Accurate.”

Honesty, trust ... and despite amazing growth through the season, Greene didn’t want to sit on his laurels and Brown wouldn’t let him if he did.

“It’s just a matter of keeping the main thing the main thing,” Greene said. “Last year I was focused on helping this team win and this year that’s my main goal.”

But he knows he has to improve.

“I also have to get better. Last year was an all-right year, but I wasn’t at the level I thought I should have been. That’s what this off-season was about; finding my weaknesses and working these last two months to correct those.”

The biggest weakness was accuracy, especially on short passes. He still had that Clemente arm for the long throws, but there were flaws in his delivery and Brown approached it straight forward.

“What I did was make a cutup of his best throws and his worst throws and then study them looking for consistencies,” Brown said. “What is he doing with his feet and release when the ball is going where it’s supposed to be and it’s a positive throw and positive result and what’s he doing when it’s a poor throw, what are the commonalities in a poor throw?”

“A lot of it is just body position and consistency. I watched the cutups of all my pass plays last year and saw all the inconsistencies in my drop, That’s what caused the inaccuracies. It’s just going back to the fundamentals of drop mechanics and timing the drops up to the routes,” Greene said.

That was what the off-season was about and it wasn’t just Brown and Greene and new WVU quarterback coach Tyler Allen, but it also included Greene’s own quarterback coach, David Morris of Quarterback Country.

“We have been working since freshman year and this off-season with coach Brown, T.A. and coach Morris and myself we went all in on focusing on the fundamentals. He doesn’t teach schematics. He leaves that to the guys in the building, but he teaches the basics of throwing,” Greene explained.

This, of course, could lead to all kinds of problems but because of the strength of the relationship between coach and quarterback, it works.

“I saw him once in January, once in February and on spring break spent a couple of days with him. Me and him talk all the time. I send him clips from practice and then we’ll talk on the phone. I’ll probably see him three or four more times before the season gets going,” Greene said.

“Tyler and Neal have been great about communicating with him. He teaches what he wants to teach. He’s a backup to Coach Brown and Tyler. The coaching points he gives down in Mobile are transported up here.”

Greene has a goal in mind.

“I want to be in the 70s,” he said, speaking in terms of completion percentage. “High 60s is the bottom floor ... 68% is the bottom of where I want to be.”

See, what’s kept him from being satisfied with last season is he knew there was more in him.

“With the things he did last year at a really high level — and I could go over them, he threw the deep ball well. We were really explosive. He ad libbed and created explosive runs. What we did in the run game; he was a huge part of that. Not only carrying the ball, but the threat of him carrying the ball,” Brown said.

“I’m just talking about the positives now, and I’m just talking about the tangibles. We’re not talking about all the intangibles like leadership and competitiveness. But, at the end of the day, he was a 53% passer. So how does he make the jump like a Bo Nix, who was in the 50%s in his first year and all of a sudden, he’s 73%. How does Garrett Greene do that?”