WVSports.com continues with our popular feature: The 3-2-1. We'll breakdown three things we learned that week, two questions we have and give one prediction.

Here is the next installment of the 3-2-1 looking at the West Virginia football program, the latest on basketball and what’s happening in recruiting.

3 things I learned:

1—West Virginia won’t be bowling. Give Neal Brown and his staff credit for getting this team to respond back-to-back weeks against ranked opponents after a near lifeless first half-showing in the first loss of the season against Texas Tech. One of those resulted in a program perception changing first-year win at Kansas State, while the other came up just short at home against Oklahoma State. The offense was able to drive the ball into position to take shots into the end zone to attempt to tie things up trailing 20-13, but the ball fell incomplete consecutive times from the 19-yard line.

But close doesn’t work in the game of football and in the end the result was a loss, the sixth in the last seven for the Mountaineers to close the year. Now sitting at 4-7, the one question that had been on the mind of many fans has been essentially rendered irrelevant. You now won’t have to worry about weighing the participation in a bowl game over a full year of eligibility by playing junior Jarret Doege in that game. Certainly a cart before the horse situation if there ever was one.

Nobody expected a banner year in the first season under Brown, even more so when this team was hit with an almost unprecedented wave of injuries and attrition throughout the course of the year. A bowl game was always the best case scenario given the circumstances and that is now out of the window snapping a five-year streak of trips to the post-season for the program. The biggest loss of it all comes in the fact that this football team isn’t going to be afforded the extra practices that come by making a bowl, which could have been key for a young team that is still very much developing.