The Penn State game is over. The buildup, the atmosphere, and everything that comes with hosting the biggest home opener since 1998 is now in the rearview.
The Mountaineers are now 0-1 on the season with 11 games left to play after the 34-12 defeat and it certainly wasn’t the start that anybody anticipated with how things unfolded.
“Bottom line is we played poorly. I say that giving credit to Penn State, they won the game. But that’s not what we’re capable of and we have higher expectations for ourselves,” head coach Neal Brown said. “I told the players in the locker room the same thing; I told the staff the exact same thing that was not good enough.”
In front of the biggest home crowd since Brown became head coach in 2019, West Virginia set out to prove that they had been overlooked in the pre-season. Instead, it appeared as if the Mountaineers weren’t ready to handle that type of contest, at least for one game. But it’s only one game and that’s the important part.
The year has just begun. It’s only one game of 12 on the slate.
“What I’ll say is we didn’t win today. Was it a big game absolutely? Everybody was here, FOX was here, and we didn’t produce. We were not productive,” Brown said.
Penn State was ranked No. 8 in the preseason poll and is a pick to potentially secure a spot in the College Football Playoff, but the effort out of the Mountaineers wasn’t good enough to beat most teams on their schedule. But that’s where having a veteran team could be critical moving forward.
It’s something those on the team already understand well from the top down.
“It’s on the leaders of the team to right the ship and all of our goals of playing in Dallas and all of that are still in front of us and it’s on us to get the guys going,” quarterback Garrett Greene said.
The senior quarterback admittedly didn’t play his best against the Nittany Lions completing just 15-28 passes for 161 scoreless yards, while rushing for just five yards on 10 carries. But he felt that preparation-wise, the Mountaineers came into the game ready and simply didn’t execute in critical situations.
“We’re not going to hit the panic button. We know we didn’t execute at a high enough level; I know I didn’t play good enough to beat a team like that,” he said.
Senior safety Anthony Wilson feels the same about the defense, which struggled at times in many of the same ways when it came to making plays to get off the field. But one game doesn’t make a season, and the focus is still on trying to improve moving forward.
“One game doesn’t define us, we’re going to be better and we’re going to continue to get better. All we can do from this is learn from it and that’s what we’re going to do moving forward,” he said.
Next up is Albany before another rivalry matchup on the road at Pitt. And then the Mountaineers jump into the meat of the Big 12 slate. There is no question that the results aren’t what anybody associated with the program wanted in the opener, but the focus now is pushing forward and becoming what many expected this team to be before the season began.
“There’s a lot of plays that we left out there but the only thing we can do is put our heads down and go back to work. That’s what we’re going to do,” Wilson said.
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