HERTZEL COLUMN: Quarterbacks need to learn from mistakes

By Bob Hertzel

MORGANTOWN — Jarrett Brown, the West Virginia quarterback, was sitting on a stool inside the academic center within the Puskar Center, a circle of journalists and want-to-be journalists standing around him.

The subject was the mentality a player — a quarterback in particular — needs to have following a loss, which was the situation in which Brown found himself, having come out on the wrong side of a 30-19 score at South Florida the previous Friday.

He took a moment, as he always does, to run his thoughts through his onboard computer, just to make sure he wasn’t going to say anything dumb.

“You take the good, you learn from the bad and you keep going,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

And then he added one more aspect to dealing with defeat.

“You have to have amnesia.”

That, of course, is something he knows a bit about, considering just three weeks earlier he had suffered what was termed a mild concussion while quarterbacking against Marshall.

While Brown was 100 percent accurate in his original assessment of how to handle a defeat, the addition of having amnesia should never really be part of the equation.

If a player is going to improve, he must remember the mistakes he makes so that he can correct them and, more than that, he must remember the feeling that comes with losing, for it is not a feeling that he wants to experience again.

It was Jackie Robinson, the baseball Hall of Famer, who put it best.

“Above anything else, I hate to lose,” he said.

This, it will be recalled, was a man who suffered every type of indignity a human can suffer as he pioneered integrating the game of baseball, yet in his mind that came nowhere near what he suffered every time he lost.

Jarrett Brown is not much different. The loss at South Florida did not go quietly into the night.

He brought it with him onto the team plane that flew home from Tampa to Morgantown, not arriving until about 3 a.m.

“The first half the flight I couldn’t sleep,” he admitted.

Here was a man who had just played a physical, tough football game, who had had adrenalin flowing through his veins for four hard hours. He was battered and worn out and emotionally drained, yet sleep would not come easily.

“You keep replaying and replaying and replaying the game over and over in your head,” he said. “I didn’t even have to watch film. I remember everything that happened on the field.”

The hours directly after a loss are the loneliest, for you live inside your mind, dissecting the preceding events.

Jarrett Brown, of course, was not alone with his thoughts. Any player who is going to amount to anything was replaying the game over and over, more the bad moments than the good, not trying to shed them from his mind until he understood how they happened and how they can be avoided in the future.

But there comes a time when you must shuck aside the self-pity and the self-analysis.

"After that, it’s time to get ready for Louisville. That’s where my focus has to be,” Brown said.

Ah, Louisville, today’s noon opponent, a visitor to Mountaineer Field without so much as a Big East victory to its name.

Certainly, no one expects this to be an easy game for the Mountaineers, yet it is safe to say that no one expects them to lose it, either. It is too important to the season, what with Cincinnati, Pitt and Rutgers lined up behind it.

One conference loss may be hard to swallow, but it should not be allowed to poison an entire season.

Brown understands this.

“You have to look at the bigger picture,” he said. “It was our first loss in the Big East. We still have a lot to play for.”

In truth, there is everything to play for, including the conference championship and a BCS bowl berth, to say nothing of a national ranking, should the Mountaineers can put together a four-game winning streak.

It won’t be easy. It won’t be expected, either.

Still, it can come, perhaps even will come if they all can remember the feeling they had as they walked off the turf of Raymond James Stadium in Tampa after that loss.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com