West Virginia head football coach Neal Brown officially wrapped up the 2022 football season on Monday. As he closed what was another lackluster season, he knows it is win now or go home heading into a difficult year ahead.
Going 5-7 in year four of your tenure isn’t exactly what Brown had planned when he took the head position of West Virginia football in 2019. New West Virginia University Director of Athletics Wren Baker decided to keep Brown around in 2023, saying he will evaluate Brown’s future as the year goes on.
With the target now fully on Brown’s back, he recognizes another 2022-like season means he will likely be looking for work elsewhere.
“It wasn’t good enough. It’s on me, I accept it,” Brown said of West Virginia’s record in 2022. “I’m proud of how our guys finished… but we weren’t consistent enough.”
The two main reasons for the struggles for the Mountaineers this season were: the offense did not meet expectation levels, and the defense — which had been the calling card for Brown in the first three years — regressed in a major way.
I really felt like we underachieved on that side of the ball,” Brown said on his offense. “When we got here in January of 2019, early on in spring, I knew this was going to be a little bit of a process as far as getting the offense. We made a decision that if I had to do over again, I definitely would is, we were going to go young on our offensive line and we had young receivers that we were going to develop.”
Brown said entering last season in the fall is when he ad a positive feeling about his offense, but they did not meet those expectations.
“Last fall was really the first point where I felt really good about our personnel from an experience and talent level where I really felt like we could compete week in and week out against the top of our league and we just didn’t do that,” Brown said.
There were three areas Brown noticed on the offense of eliminating errors, efficiency on first plays of drives as well as on third down, and explosive plays down the field.
“From what we’ve got to improve at, those three E’s,” Brown said.
Defensively, Brown is hoping the unit in 2023 will return to the standard they played to in 2020 and 2021.
Brown’s defense ranked ninth out of all 10 teams in the Big 12 last season in scoring defense, allowing more than 32 points per game. In 2020, the Mountaineers ranked first in the Big 12 in scoring defense, while ranking fifth in 2021.
“I think if you look at how we played defense over the first three years here I think we established the way we wanted to play, we had a unique system, and gave us a chance not in every game, but in a high percentages of our contests we gave ourselves a chance to win,” Brown said. “And then last year it just wasn’t. It wasn’t up to our standards.”
Brown acknowledged the easy thing to do would have been to clean house and start from scratch with this defense, but he felt like that and said that wasn’t the right thing to do for his team.
“I think when things go wrong you start really looking in and saying ‘okay why,'” Brown said. “I think the easy thing to do a lot of times is, the easiest thing is let’s just start firing people. I’m not saying that’s the wrong reaction all the time, but I don’t think that’s the right answer in a lot of cases because you see a lot of mass firings and then do they get better or not.”
Brown then added on about the urgency of fixing the defense from a season ago as he knows he must win this year at West Virginia.
“When I started really kind of evaluating where we were defensively, I get to this — we need to win now. That’s what it is… We need to have a winning season.”
Having to win now is what decides staff changes and other moves, because the priority is turning a team who was not bowl eligible to a team who can win in a nine-month period.
“The best way after going through and really evaluating everything, the best way in my opinion is consistency,” Brown said. “We’ve got to coach better on the defensive side of the football, I think there’s no question about that.”
Brown said he believes in defensive coordinator Jordan Lesley along with the other defensive coaches because they have shown in the past they can have success at this level.
“In 2022 we weren’t good enough but you don’t forget how to coach in a one-year period,” Brown said. “In pass defense, that’s one of our issues in 2022 — well we were first in the league in 2020 in pass defense, we were third in 2021.”
The pressure for Brown will now mount as the winter continues on. Spring practice begins March 21 for the Mountaineers while Brown knows the time is now for his football team.
