West Virginia head coach Neal Brown understands that his football team lost to a talented Penn State group.
But the Mountaineers didn’t help matters in the slightest.
“We played bad football. I can sit here and talk for a long time but that’s the deal,” Brown said.
West Virginia played poorly in two of the three phases of the game against the Nittany Lions with special teams the only area where the program gave themselves a chance. It was a disappointing 34-12 result with a lot of eyes on the Mountaineers football program with the national showcase game and the build up to it.
“To say I’m disappointed in how we played would be an understatement. We played really poorly, and it was on a big stage and I’m aware of that and we played poorly,” Brown said.
The head coach pointed the finger at himself taking ultimate responsibility, but also believes that the coaching staff didn’t put the players in position in key moments of the game. It also didn’t help matters that the best players simply didn’t play well outside of a handful across the roster.
On offense, West Virginia was erratic early with a pair of issues with timing and snaps given the shifts and motions that were in the gameplan. Brown took the responsibility off of center Brandon Yates, but pointed out that they’re issues that didn’t occur in practice which makes it even more frustrating. In fact, the problems early on in that department forced the Mountaineers to get away from their gameplan until they got back on track because that is such a part of their offensive scheme.
“If we had those issues we wouldn’t have ran those style of plays,” Brown said.
The Mountaineers only had one penalty in the game but overall didn’t play with the discipline and technique required to win this type of football game. That included alignments, communication and cutting routes short as well as some critical drops that left potential big plays on the field.
“Again, we’re a veteran group so my expectations for this group are extremely high and we didn’t come close to meeting those expectations today,” he said. “I’m in charge of it but we have to execute as well.”
Defensively, West Virginia didn’t tackle well in space and struggled in situations where there were plays to be made down the field in 50/50 situations. Penn State quarterback Drew Allar completed 11-17 passes for 216 yards and 3 touchdowns but also displayed the ability to extend drives with his legs.
Still, for the fourth consecutive season West Virginia will start 0-1 with a challenging slate ahead. This was something that caught Brown by surprise given how his team performed heading into the season especially with how seasoned the unit was on offense.
“There should not be this anxiety. There shouldn’t have been this lack of execution and there just was. We were anxious we never got comfortable, and we didn’t execute. We didn’t give ourselves a chance, they didn’t necessarily beat us we didn’t give ourselves a chance. It wasn’t young players; it was people that played a lot of football here, so we’ve got to figure that out,” Brown said.
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