What When Wrong for WVU in 2024 That Led to Firing Neal Brown

Former WVU football coach Neal Brown feels that losses to Pitt and Iowa State are what ultimately led to his firing on Sunday.

Talking with Hoppy Kercheval on “MetroNews Talkline” Friday morning, Brown said the losses to Pitt and Iowa State had a large negative impact on the fanbase and embodied the team’s underachieving 2024 season.

The Mountaineers were up by 10 with less than five minutes to play against Pitt, but the Panthers came back to score two touchdowns and take the win in the third game of the season.

“Our fanbase had a really hard time with the Pitt loss, and I did too,” said Brown, who went 1-2 in three Backyard Brawls. “We lost that game and we should not have lost it. There’s a real dislike and hatred for Pitt here. I understood that, I didn’t know that when I took it in January of ‘19, but as we got close and as we got into that game, I’m very aware of that.”

West Virginia followed the Pitt loss with Big 12 wins over Kansas and Oklahoma State, leading into a home game against Iowa State on Oct. 12. The Mountaineers trailed 14-10 going into the fourth quarter, but allowed two touchdowns to fall down 28-10 in the loss.

“We had an opportunity with a lot of momentum in the Coal Rush game against Iowa State and we failed in the fourth quarter,” Brown said.

Ultimately, Brown said the team should have been better than its 6-6 record.

“I think we had a team that should have been better than 6-6. It’s a team that easily could’ve been 7-5 or 8-4,” he said. “With the schedule could we have been 10-2? I’m not sure about that, but we should’ve been better and I think that’s a fair criticism.”

Prior to the season, Brown and the players said the team’s expectation for 2024 was to compete for a Big 12 championship. The Mountaineers finished in a tie for eighth place in the Big 12 with a 5-4 conference record.

“We played a difficult schedule,” Brown said. “That’s not an excuse, that’s just what it is.”

As to why the Mountaineers underperformed expectations this season, Brown said the overall quality of the defense and inconsistencies on offense were to blame.

“The things that I would say are my ownership are we didn’t play well enough on defense and our evaluations over a couple of years in the defensive backfield hurt us,” Brown said. “We didn’t do a good enough job and then we didn’t have the money to spend to go fix it.”

WVU brought in six transfers in the secondary this past offseason, none of whom played particularly well this season. In the Big 12, West Virginia’s defense finished 14th in passing yards (3,227), last in yards per attempt (9.0), 13th in touchdowns (24), 13th in completion percentage (63.6%) and last in interceptions (five).

On offense, WVU ranked 11th in scoring (28.5 points per game), but scored less than 20 points four times, losing all four games.

“We were inconsistent on offense,” Brown said. “Sometimes we were really good and sometimes we were average. We weren’t necessarily bad, maybe other than Saturday, but we were inconsistent.”

The team was 12th in total yards (4,736), 13th in passing (2,406) and fifth in rushing (2,330).

For a related story, Neal Brown wasn’t surprised by firing, ‘not bitter’ about how WVU tenure ended.