WVU Football Ends Regular Season in Worst Spot All Year on ESPN FPI

As the dust continues to settle after WVU ended the regular season in the worst way possible, the Mountaineers now know how their 52-15 loss to Texas Tech impacted their placement in the ESPN FPI.

To no surprise, West Virginia endured a drastic slide all the way out of the top 50. WVU finishes the regular season at No. 62, dropping 13 spots from where they were after beating UCF to clinch bowl eligibility.

Even though most WVU fans may not want to hear from the now former Mountaineer head coach Neal Brown anymore, he did speak following West Virginia’s embarrassing loss in Lubbock on Saturday.

Brown opened up his postgame press conference by detailing what went wrong for the Mountaineers and trying to explain why his team was never even able to be competitive.

Neal Brown Details Disastrous Day in Lubbock: ‘Wasn’t Good Enough, We’re Not Hiding From That’

“Today was just not good enough in the first half. I thought our guys competed in the second half, but in all three phases in the first half, we were very poor. We handled the travel fine, we’ve played well on the road this year and we practiced pretty well this week. We just did not win a time in the first half and did not compete. I think offensively, we had a slow start. We had missed an opportunity on fourth down,” said Brown.

He then brought up a critical early failure on a fourth down play that halted a WVU drive when the game was still close as a turning point.

“We had Huddy (Hudson Clement) open, and we didn’t connect on that. That would have been a big play. I don’t know if we win, but it definitely would not have been the ass-whooping it ended up being.”

But even if that play went the Mountaineers way, it wouldn’t have mattered based on the rest of the game unfolded.

Brown was fired on Sunday, ending his six-year tenure as head coach of the West Virginia Mountaineers. The Neal Brown era for West Virginia concludes with a 37-35 overall record and two bowl wins. Brown’s struggles against ranked opponents and failures in big games embody the darkest six-year period for the program since before Don Nehlen took over in 1980.

A 2024 season that opened with so much hype concluded at 6-6. Offensive coordinator Chad Scott will taking over as the head coach for the bowl game in an interim capacity.

For a related story, current and former WVU players react to WVU firing Neal Brown.