Let’s start with a housekeeping item: After Monday’s practice, there are only two more “open” practices where the media will be allowed to watch, so these observation posts won’t be as frequent the rest of the month.

Moving on to Day 4…

We got to watch the first 30 minutes of practice this morning, and I spent the bulk of it watching the quarterbacks and receivers.

I wrote a bit about the quarterbacks and receivers in last night’s post and some more on the quarterbacks for the Tuesday paper, so I won’t bury you with the same information here.

What I will say is that nobody look especially sharp in the little bit I got to watch before the “competition” period. Neal Brown saw the same thing and then some after the media was ushered out the gate at the practice field.

“Disappointed in today’s work,” Brown said. “It was kind of a recovery day. We were out there for true work for probably about an hour. I thought it was unfocused and probably our most disappointing of the four [practices].”

Monday’s competition period did produce perhaps the best moment of camp (that we have seen) so far.

Today’s offense against defense challenge was about one on one matchups. Cornerback Keith Washington got the best of receiver Sam James by batting down an Austin Kendall pass in the first round. Offensive lineman Kelby Wickline held off defensive lineman Quondarius Qualls in pass protection to pull the offense even with the defense in the drill.

The deciding matchup was between running back Alec Sinkfield and outside linebacker Tykee Smith. Sinkfield ran a corner route that was defended well by Smith, but Jack Allison threw a really nice pass to the back shoulder and Sinkfield hauled it in with one hand in the end zone, setting off a mob celebration by the offensive players.

#WVU does some sort of offense vs defense challenge at every practice we’ve been allowed to watch, and today’s was especially fun. Watch all the way to the end. pic.twitter.com/s9XS0c0ihW

— Tom Bragg (@TomBraggSports) August 5, 2019

That was the last thing we got to see before it was time for the media to leave, and seemed like a decent enough play to build on the rest of practice. That wasn’t the case, according to Brown, who was clearly not all that happy with the team when he met with the media early in the afternoon.

One last bit of housekeeping:

Here is the schedule for the rest of the week:

Tuesday: Practice closed; interviews with offensive assistant coaches scheduled

Wednesday: No practice, no interviews

Thursday: Practice open to the media 9:50 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.; interviews with players scheduled

Friday: Practice closed; interviews with defensive assistants scheduled

Saturday: Practice closed; Neal Brown press conference scheduled for 5:15 p.m.