Morgantown, West Virginia – Since Neal Brown has arrived in Morgantown as the head coach of the Mountaineers, West Virginia has not had one single night game. In the past three seasons, West Virginia has played 15 home games – sixteen following West Virginia’s noon finale against Texas – and not one has been played at night.
Today, Brown addressed this at his weekly press conference. “We haven’t played one in three years and we aren’t going to play one this year. I don’t know. Really, I don’t even know how to respond to questions about that, to be honest with you.
You know, we’ve got them (night games) within our TV package. That’s probably more of a question for our conference office. Just listening to our fans and the feedback I get, they prefer night games. You know, I’ve heard about night games here. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to experience one. It’s difficult for me to talk about because I have zero impact on that, you know? I think it’s unfortunate and I was really hoping to have one next week (against Texas), but it’s going to be an early kick as well.”
The issue here is that night games are typically reserved for games that are intriguing and meaningful. If a team is not winning – unless the team is one of the marquee teams in college football – night games just don’t happen.
In the past three seasons, West Virginia hasn’t really had a major marquee matchup at home. Probably the most intriguing matchup during Brown’s tenure would be the 2019 game against the then #11 ranked Texas Longhorns. However, West Virginia was 3-1 against very average competition at the time and suffered an embarrassing 38-7 loss at Missouri two weeks prior. That just isn’t a game that anyone outside of West Virginia and Texas would care about.
Neal Brown has a very clever way of passing off blame, but the bottom line is that his West Virginia teams haven’t done enough to deserve a night game in Morgantown.
