West Virginia head coach Neal Brown discussed his team’s successes and failures during his four seasons with the Mountaineers.
MORGANTOWN, West Virginia — In his most recent interview, Neal Brown sat down with Mark Rogers of The Voice of College Football to discuss his time at West Virginia. During the interview, Brown seemingly took no responsibility for West Virginia’s subpar performance on the field and instead blamed the failures on these variety of issues:
- “We’ve just been average. We haven’t been poor by any means or bad, but we haven’t been good either. When we took over a program in 2019, they had a very talented roster in 2018, which was a roster that had 5 or 6 draft picks. This was a team that climbed into the Top 10 in the country and then lost four out of their last five games. So we took over a team that was really, really young in 2019 and we had some real holes and we had a real deficiency on the offensive line, which is one of the biggest factors in winning football games and we had less experience on defense. So we won five in our first year and I would argue that that was a better coaching job than our ten win seasons at Troy.”
1. West Virginia has been bad since Neal Brown has taken over. Not average. Not below average. Bad. 22-25 at West Virginia is absolutely unacceptable. Although the roster that Brown took over was young, they were extremely talented and capable of winning football games. He was not left with a bare cupboard, as he and his loyalists claim.
2. “Then we get into year two and we hit the ground and made some strides in recruiting and we started to build a culture and the infrastructure wasn’t in place. That’s not a knock on the previous staff, but the infrastructure just wasn’t equal to some of the other teams in the Big 12 after making the big jump from the Big East.”
2. The infrastructure was fine. Dana Holgorsen had no problem winning games from 2012-2018. Losing only happened consistently when Neal Brown took over the program.
3. “We were doing some things and building our staff and then COVID hits. I thought we managed that well. We won 6 games and won a bowl game for the first time in a long time here.”
3. Every coach in college football had to deal with COVID. Blaming his team’s performance on COVID is ridiculous.
4. “Going into 2021, we started off 2-4, losing some close games, and then we won four out of six games, and then played really poorly in the bowl game. Minnesota was just a lot better than us at the time.”
4. Minnesota should never be a lot better than West Virginia. Never.
5. “And then just under-performed in 2022. We go 5-7. I thought we had a better roster than that. It was probably the most disappointing season I’ve ever had as a head coach.”
5. 2022 was more than simply under-performing. It was abysmal. During the interview, Brown never took personal responsibility for anything that’s gone wrong at West Virginia University over the last four seasons.
Listen to the full interview below:
Listening to Neal Brown in his latest interview on "The Voice of College Football" was hilarious and sad. He took zero responsibility for anything that's gone wrong and blamed everything but himself. Absolutely outrageous! #WVU
— The Voice of Morgantown (@voicemorgantown) May 24, 2023
