West Virginia head coach Neal Brown isn’t discouraged by his football team’s 38-15 season opening road loss to No. 7 Penn State. Disappointed? Certainly, but there is still plenty of belief about this club.
The Mountaineers played in a difficult environment in front of 110,747 fans, the fourth largest crowd in the history of Beaver Stadium, and while they lost the game did do some things well.
“We’ve got a really good football team. I think time will tell. I thought our guys handled the elements, they competed and played clean football,” Brown said.
West Virginia didn’t turn the ball over against the Nittany Lions and recorded only one procedural penalty, five flags overall for a total of 55-yards. But even with the loss to a team that Brown believes is very talented and has a chance to make a run at the College Football Playoff, things aren’t finished when it comes to what lies ahead for the Mountaineers.
“There’s been a lot of really good West Virginia teams bounce back from a loss here and I think we’ll be one of those. I have no doubt that we will. We’ll bounce back. We’re onward and upward,” he said.
The Mountaineers came into the game against Penn State looking at opportunities to be aggressive both in the play calling and situationally. Overall, the Mountaineers attempted a pair of trick plays and attempted to convert on six different fourth down situations.
Brown understood coming into the game that in order to win West Virginia needed to get some breaks in the game and force Penn State into some turnovers and penalties. Neither of those happened, but there were certainly opportunities to get some takeaways, but both fell harmlessly to the turf.
“Am I disappointed? Yeah, anytime you lose there’s a shit ton invested in this now,” he said. “Am I disappointed? Absolutely. Am I discouraged with our football team? No, because I know we’re going to be good.”
Two areas that must improve are both the West Virginia passing game as well as the secondary in order to create explosive plays on offense as well as limit them on the other side. Brown said that his secondary simply didn’t play well enough because there were guys running free on both rub routes and crossing patterns and that will be a major issue moving forward if that isn’t cleaned up.
Especially given the caliber of the passing teams that remain on the schedule.
The same can be said for the offensive side of the ball, as West Virginia struggled to generate down-the-field passing plays outside a 37-yard pitch and catch to Devin Carter.
“We really need to be more explosive in the passing game,” Brown said.
West Virginia now drops to 0-1 on the season for the third time in three years and will host Duquesne, Pittsburgh and Texas Tech over the next several weeks. That third game will be critical as it will be a benchmark of just how much this team has truly improved when that rolls around.
“We’re going to go home get back to work on Monday prepare to win a game then we got another rivalry coming in,” Brown said.
“felt like we did some good things, but we’ve got to continue to get better by week three we better be significantly better,” he added.
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