Flashback to August, and West Virginia was preparing for the football world's focus to be upon them. Hosting a top-ten team in Penn State, ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show was in town, and it seemed as though Neal Brown had turned a corner.
Flash forward three months, and West Virginia is now searching for a new head coach after the Mountaineers went 6-6 in Brown’s sixth season as head coach.
The end of the 2023 season brought a lot of hope for the Mountaineers in 2024. Nine wins and a bowl victory seemed to finally show that Brown had everything in place to win at WVU.
That was until this season happened. With hopes of competing for a Big 12 Championship, West Virginia fumbled every opportunity they had to crack the upper tier of the Big 12 standings, as this season was emblematic of the Brown era at WVU.
Sitting at 1-1, West Virginia had a prime opportunity to hit the road and win a rivalry game against Pitt. Two years ago, it was Brown’s play calling called into question after his decision to punt on a short fourth down against the rival Panthers. This year, it was a lack of late-game execution as WVU’s 10-point lead with under five minutes to play was erased, leading to a loss for the Mountaineers.
Under Brown, WVU went 13-20 in road games, giving up an average of 36.75 points per game. Against Pitt this year, they gave up 38 in the loss.
Following the Pitt loss, WVU had to rebound quickly, and they did, but they did so against the teams they were ‘supposed to beat.’ WVU beat Kansas and Oklahoma State in back-to-back weeks, but the combined record of those teams this year was 8-16, with neither team being bowl-eligible.
Sitting at 2-0 in Big 12 play, the Mountaineers then had exactly what most fans would wish for — a home game against a ranked opponent at night. Those two games in mid-October could have been a launchpad for the Mountaineers to put their losses to Penn State and Pitt behind them and prove they belong in the Big 12 title conversation.
Instead, it was two losses in a row, falling by a combined score of 73-34. That is similar to the trends of Brown facing ranked teams. Brown went 3-17 against ranked teams while at WVU, including an average point differential of -12.7 in games against ranked teams. Against Iowa State, Brown’s team lost by 12.
Now at 2-2, Brown and the Mountaineers inspired confidence with wins against Arizona and Cincinnati to stay in the Big 12 title conversation entering the middle of November. However, both those teams also didn’t have a winning record and missed a bowl game this year.
Brown’s Mountaineers then hosted Baylor, a team that finished with an 8-4 record, and they gave up 49 points in a loss.
That loss pretty much sealed WVU’s fate in the Big 12 race before the Mountaineers hit the road one last time to end 2024, getting trounced by Texas Tech. That also was an alarming loss as Brown’s teams had at least one no-show on the road during tenure. That trend seemed to be set to come to an end until the Texas Tech loss happened.
This year, Brown didn’t beat a team with a winning record. In his career, he went 7-29 in games against teams with a winning record.
While West Virginia is set to owe Brown roughly $9.7 million, the money is not the point of this, it’s the results on the field. Throughout Brown’s tenure, he failed to get it done in the biggest of games or against quality competition. This year, it was the same story.
Brown’s tenure was not defined by one single game, but the 2024 season somewhat encapsulated it. Beat up on the lower-level teams and struggle to get the job done against the good teams. That’s just unacceptable at a school like WVU, with the tradition of winning it has.
There’s no denying how good of a person Brown is and how he represented the university as well as the state of West Virginia. However, football coaches are judged by wins and losses, and Brown couldn’t win the games when they mattered the most. He couldn’t do it in 2024, and he couldn’t do it in his six years at West Virginia.
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