Blue & Gold News West Virginia wide receiver coach Bilal Marshall during pregame warmups.

MORGANTOWN — Not to get too philosophical on a day when we enjoyed as rare an event as you are going to find in our solar system, a total eclipse of the sun, we thought it might be both informative and fun to broach a rather philosophical question to a football coach.

“You guys coach the players, but who coaches the coaches?” West Virginia wide receiver coach Bilal Marshall was asked near the end of his media interview following the seventh practice of the spring.

He was the perfect target for such a question for his young, having just turned 30 after last year having been named on 247 Sports’ list of the 30 best under 30 assistants in college football, something he accomplished despite not taking the traditional route into the coaching profession.

It was also quite meaningful because WVU’s staff under Neal Brown has put its passing game in the hands of two relatively inexperienced coaches in Marshall with the receivers and first-year full-time assistant Tyler Allen with the quarterbacks.

Marshall’s initial response was the one you would expect, named Coach Neal Brown as the one who coaches the coaches.

“Coach Brown does a great job of holding us accountable and holding us to a standard. and pushing me,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be the only guy in the whole building to coach the position the head coach played. That’s like his little baby, so he pushes me but he also allows me to have some freedom of my own. He allows me to experiment with some things.”

Marshall’s path, as noted, wasn’t pointed toward becoming a coach the way many — dare we say most — coaches’ career paths are laid out.

He played at Purdue as a wide receiver, but when his career ended he thought he was through with football and went into business. He finished his playing career in 2016 at Purdue, went into sales in 2017, then sort of realized that he was traveling down a path that just didn’t offer what he was looking for.

At Purdue, his coach (and mentor to be) was Gerad Parker, a name that should be familiar for he coached receivers and was offensive coordinator under Brown at WVU before moving to Notre Dame and then, this year, taking over as head coach in Brown’s former office at Troy.

How it all came to fruition was in 2016, my last year playing in college, Gerad would always tell me I needed to coach,” Marshall said. “He did that over and over and I just kind of brushed him off. I wasn’t really thinking about it.

“It really wasn’t until 2018, he was coaching at Duke at the time and me and three of the other wideouts I played with went to go visit him. He had a bunch of young wideouts at Duke and he kind of wanted us to show them the way … how we played, how we practiced. We had a really good room my senior year and [the coaching bug] kind of bit me right there. It was kind of fun.”

Later that year, with Marshall working at his sales job at home in Miami, chance had it that Duke was scheduled to play the Hurricanes in Miami.

“I asked him for some tickets,” Marshall recalled. “He had me come to the hotel to talk to the guys that night. I just kind of felt an air of, ‘Man, this is what I want to do.’ I called him that same night and told him I want to coach and he kind of said, verbatim, ‘It’s about damn time.'”

Marshall coached briefly at the high school level and when Parker was named receivers coach under Brown at WVU, he brought Marshall in as a graduate assistant.

So, it was that Marshall and Brown wound up coaching him, but while there have been thousands of books written on coaching football, your own story is written every day and there really is no script to follow.

“There’s some things that are trial and error. That’s what practice is for, to try some things out, do some different things,” Marshall said.

But you do not go in blindly.

“Every position coach hopefully has goals and aspirations,” Marshall said. “They want to get better. For me, I want to take the next step, learning more football as it goes. I’m still young, just turned 30. I’m trying to grow as well, in every facet of my life.

“For my guys, we want to become better route runners. We want to win at the top of routes. There’s a lot of things I’ve been studying, drill-wise, see some things on Twitter I’ll take and improvise for my guys. I don’t just rely on things I’ve done in the past. I try to go out and find more drills, more ideas.”

The truth is, Marshall is the kind of person who always takes an analytical approach.

“Before I started coaching in college, I laid out a kind of 10-year plan for myself and some milestones I wanted to hit,” he said. “As anybody, if you don’t plan ahead, you are going to be wrong. You have to have a plan, something you look forward to; something you are trying to attain to continue to get better.

“I talk to my guys all the time and tell them ‘Have goals, not just football goals; goals in academics’ goals in general so you are always looking forward and are not just stagnant.”

A year ago, there was improvement in the WVU wide receivers, especially the emergence of walk-on Hudson Clement emerging as a potential star and in working the likes of Rodney Gallagher, Traylon Ray, EJ Horton into the rotation.

He is combining all he’s learned to this point in an effort to have them reach their potential while, at the same time, he is relying heavily on what he considers the most important lesson he has learned through it all.

“The big thing for me is preparedness; be prepared for meetings, being prepared for your players. The worst thing as a coach is trying to coach on the fly; trying to make things up on the fly. That’s something you should never do on the fly,” he said.

“That way they get every ounce they can out of it. If they are not prepared, they are going to be playing slow. If they play slow, we lose games.

“For me, every single morning, offensive coordinator Chad Scott, he gets here at 4:30 a.m. Now, that’s not something I’m going to do, but I get here early and plan my day out and then stay late and plan the next day out to make sure I have everything exactly the way I want it.”

With this his second year on the job, things are moving forward.

“It’s a trust level. I’m able to coach them differently. I’m able to coach them hard in a way that I can go ballistic and they know it’s not coming from a place of hate or anger but from a place of love where I want to see them get better,” he said.

“With that, too, guys want to play for you. They want to go the extra mile for you, which I think is a big thing. I’ve been on the other side of that, having a great receiver coach that you want to make happy.”

It all has drawn Marshall and his players together.

“The room is very close,” he said. “I mess with them all the time. I was on vacation back in February and I was bored and I asked them what they were doing in a group chat and they all sent me a picture of them at Preston Fox’s house and they were all hanging out.

“That’s something that’s rare in a wide receiver room. Everybody wants the ball, right? At least I hope they want the ball. I don’t want wide receivers who don’t want the ball. To be able to root for another, to push each other, cheer for one another, hold each other accountable. That’s just not something you see a whole lot, especially from that age group.”