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MORGANTOWN -- The tone was set with the first words out of West Virginia football coach Neal Brown's mouth at the Mountaineers' signing day press conference.
"Huge day for our program," he said. "Our plan is to build our roster through high level high school athletes, develop them and then retain them. For most of these signees, this is a two-tier process and it truly takes a village."
Call the village, if you must, "Puskarville", for it takes nearly everyone involved in the program to get to the point where the 22 athletes, some of them very special athletes, can build the final product that runs out onto the football field in the fall.
These recruits are the lifeblood of any football program and Brown, as anyone who knows him understands, is involved with all of them and in all of it, setting forth a plan and then doing his best to see that it works out.
Having a winning season, as they have had this year, helps. Having All-Americans helps. Having an exciting offense helps. The coaches recruit, the players recruit, the planning is incredibly intricate.
"Every time we host a recruit, we are putting on a wedding reception," Brown said.
It is a process from A-to-W … from Kyle Altuner, a 290-pound offensive lineman from Olney, Maryland, who graded out at 95% for the season, was ranked by ESPN as the No. 23 inside offensive lineman nationally and who had offers from Penn State, Florida State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Tennessee, among others, to to Rickey Williams, a linebacker from Akron whom 247Sports tabbed as the No. 52 linebacker nationally.
In between there were any number of potential stars, and we will not try to name them all, such as a running back named Trae'Von Dunbar, who is out of the mold of most of their great running backs at 5-10 and 205 pounds from Aiken, S.C., and who ran for an amazing 3,062 yards as a senior and who was a track standout.
There was Keyshawn Robinson, listed as an athlete with credentials to prove it, for not only was he a dangerous wide receiver, a defensive back, returned kicks and punts, but also ran 10.71 in the 100, 21.52 in the 200 and 48.26 in the 400 for state titles, but also was on the victorious 4×200 relay team at Jefferson High.
He was one of three West Virginians to sign, joining state player of the year Princeton wide receiver Dom Collins, who finished with 83 catches for 1897 yards and 27 touchdowns, and Cabell Midland linebacker Curtis Jones.
Brown has been true to his vow to mine his home state for players and this year alone had five players from West Virginia who were major contributors to the offense with linemen Zach Frazier, Doug Nester and Wyatt Milum and wide receivers Preston Fox and Hudson Clement.
"To say we would have that many starters from West Virginia, I don't know if that was our expectation but I felt if we had 20 to 25 players from the state that would mean about a fourth of our players were from West Virginia," Brown said.
Brown estimates that in the five years they've been here only a couple of in-state players they wanted got away from them.
There was even a late gift as wide receiver Ric'Darious Farmer, a four-star product out of Melbourne, Fla., flipped from UCF and signed with the Mountaineers.
This group is a far cry from what WVU was landing in the late days of the Dana Holgorsen regime or in Brown's early days.
That was a time when he was figuring out where he could recruit, who he could recruit and trying to get some stability on his coaching staff. Recruited players would know the man that recruited them would be there for them.
See, Brown believes, if there are two words that stand tallest in recruiting, it's honesty and trust.
"This is just me speaking," he began. "You have to be honest about communication and be who you are. What I mean by that is playing time is all about trust. You have to trust the player to get the most out of the player and the player has to trust the coach.
"A lot of times in recruiting what happens is the individual who recruits the player is different than the individual who coaches the player," Brown continued.
He wasn't talking necessarily about some other individual doing the coaching, just a change in relationship from coach/recruit to coach/player.
"What I mean is everything is great, there's no difficult conversations, they try to be their friend in recruiting and when they get on campus, they are completely different," Brown explained. "I try to look at it from the 18-year-old's perspective. If they are treated differently when they first get on campus it would be hard to trust that individual.
"So, tell my staff to be the same person coaching them as you were recruiting them. Sometimes that's effective. Sometimes it's not, but that's what's important to me."
In many ways recruiting an 18-year-old is no different than selling him his first used car, which is a type of salesmanship that doesn't carry a golden reputation with it..
"I think you have to be careful," Brown said. "First of all, these guys are a lot more intelligent than people give them credit for. If it looks like a rat, smells like a rat, it probably is a rat and they can sniff it out. You just have to be up front. There's so much information out there now, you're not going to trick them.
"The other thing is in one direct message they can communicate with everybody on your team, so you're not hiding anything anymore. Just be up front with them. If you up front and honest, you'll get the ones you are supposed to get."
And, from an early look at this year's recruiting, Neal Brown got the ones he was supposed to get.