Everything Neal Brown Said Following WVU's Blowout Loss in Lubbock
Opening statement
"Not a whole lot to say. That was complete domination. First I'll credit coach McGuire, his staff, his players, what they executed that's as well as they played. Coming off a bye week, I thought that they were good. And we were equally bad. Probably as disappointed as I've ever been as a football coach in my entire career, especially in the second half. We go into half 17 to 3, and I thought we kind of weathered the storm with their offense. And I thought we played about as bad as we could offensively, but we show that we can actually play worse in the second half. And you know, this team's just been a roller coaster. We played really well against a really good football team last week and Baylor and won the game and then we played about as bad as we possibly can play the game of football today. And it's unbelievably frustrating to say the least. Now I'll talk about all three phases, not many of yours so there's not many questions. So like I'll hit a few things like offensively we were just bad. Bad. We didn't play well at any position. We never gave our team a chance. Never. Four turnovers. Two of them on balls that got taken away from us. Didn't protect well up front. receivers were a non factor in the game. You know, defensively to be fair, I mean, you're gonna look at the numbers and say, oh, well, they yeah, but I mean, it's not it's it's tough to even evaluate them because they had to go and play after four turnovers and you know, the results are what they are because they had played 34 minutes in the game, and 100 and some plays. Some of that self-inflicted but we competed at times on that side of the ball. I thought we had opportunities for the ball in the first half. I think they put the ball on the ground three times, maybe four but I know for sure three and we didn't get any of them. I thought one of them was wrongly officiated. And then we had an interception on the first drive that we didn't make the play on. And so and then they were more physical in us. They moved the pile all night and a lot of that has to do you know they did a good job running. But our pad level, we tackled high all day. And in special teams, we didn't do anything to change the game. And so I don't necessarily think we played bad like we did in the other two phases, but we didn't do anything to change the game. But that's about as clear as I can be about that game."
Lack of energy/leadership
"I was riled up about as much as I could be in the first quarter, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, offensively, there's some good to that when you're even keel. But you need somebody to kind of get in people's face and pick them up. You need that to come from a player and our leaders, in fairness to them, that's not their personality. And you don't want them to ask, you know, JT and Zack are our leaders offensively, and that's not their personality and what you don't ever want to ask somebody to do is do something that’s out of their character. With that being said, though, you know, we've got to be better. You know, like, we ran the ball at times, okay. But we had penalties. The turnovers should not happen. Those are not forced turnovers. And they kicked our tail in man coverage. It is what it is."
Offense
"You know, we just didn’t have very many plays, you know, we weren't necessarily unbalanced. We didn't run the ball. We called 26 run plays, I think we probably had more than that. Couple of pull the ball through and run play. So we were pretty balanced about 50/50 far as run pass, but what happens is all of a sudden you had a holding penalty like we did I think the first drive or the first drive of the second and all sudden, you're at first and 25 and it's hard to et it back. The one thing that we didn't do a good enough job of is we were in four down territory a lot and we didn't do a good job on third down getting positive plays and that killed us."
Defense
"We got to do a better job challenging, you know, and honestly I thought we had a plan coming in and we just didn't we didn't do a good enough job setting the edge. You know, like we were right down the middle and those perimeter blocks and they're bigger than we are. And they consumed us and we got to pick an edge and go down and set the edge and then we got to pursue from the inside. And you know what it looked like when Aubrey Burks made the play finally in the fourth quarter, that's what it should look like and you know, the interior run game, that's not something that's been a strength of theirs and they hit some plays on us that they hadn't hit against other people. And then the screens, we got to do a better job of setting that up. We got to be physical and that's been an issue. You know, and that's something that is probably as disappointing as anything that happened in the game because that's something that we worked a lot on this week. And it did not show."
If Tony Mathis and Justin Johnson getting injured affected the play calling
"It did, it did in the fact that we only had three running backs here. Okay, so and our travel roster was kind of weird because we had some guys who weren't sure if they're gonna play or not play. Alright, so we had to load up a few positions and you only get 70 and so we only brought three running backs and then those two got hurt and couldn’t play in the second half. So it was a zero factor in the outcome. Be real clear on that. But it was affected how we had to call the game in the second half."
Charles Woods
"Yeah, we did and he got banged up again. He didn't he didn't finish the game. He got banged up again in the first half and I don't know how many play but not many. We wanted to play in about 20. He practiced a couple days this week. Felt confident in that. But he got banged up again."
Texas Tech's tempo
"Yeah, I thought the tempo, it wasn't a surprise. It's not like oh man, they really caught us by surprise with the tempo. I mean, we didn't you know, our response wasn't very good to it. They kept us on our heels, you know and the thing about it is they had a big play for a touchdown. They had another one where he missed a bunch of tackles, but they had two big plays. All those yards really two big plays. And so they kind of just chipped away. And credit them. They were patient and they got it into third and shorts and fourth and shorts and they converted. And we didn’t. And we were getting in and we were really poor on third down. I mean, we were 4 of 14 on third down. And like I said we had some third and long's where we didn't give ourselves a chance to get in the fourth down position. You know, because some of the times you know, you're like, you know, if you get in a fourth and 10, that's tough sledding, I don't care who you're playing. And then you're gonna get them to on a short field. And so we got to, and that's been a strength of us, our offense. This year, we've been really good on third down one of the top third down teams in the country. But we stopped today and we gave the ball back to them way too often and the turnovers. Like I said, I don't know if I have a positive word to say about us offensively today."
Young guys playing late
"Well, we had a bunch of people get hurt. So, you know, I think there's some guys who have played more plays and we wanted them to. We subbed our D line in. I think there's probably a distinct difference when we had our twos in there some. But again, the numbers that they have offensively are good but it's a lot of fours and threes and fives and and we've missed a bunch of tackles and and a lot of that is just fundamental. Like we were high. We didn't do a good job of getting balanced and getting our feet squared. We ran by the ball a bunch and those are some of those are repeated mistakes which are the most frustrating for me. And really the hardest to swallow. Honestly."
Anyone not playing hard
"It's hard to say. I can't sit up here and say yea or nay to watch it. I told them the same. I'll tell you this, they are to be held accountable for it. Because there's a lot of things that you know, that are that we can tolerate but not playing hard is not one of them. And if there were people who didn’t play hard, their ass won’t play next week. I promise you that.
"Here's the thing man, you got to play. Like that's part of the frustrating part of the second half. That's why we ended up just playing a bunch of those freshmen in the second half. You looked at it. We just played a bunch of those freshmen. I want people that were eager. I thought we had a wide-eye about us, which I don't understand. I do not understand that. But we just put those freshmen in and played them. There’s a bunch of freshmen out there on offense. There's a whole lot of freshmen out there on defense. And you know, we probably could have kept the score down some but not playing them. But my whole deal is they were eager in and they were trying to do what they were coached to do."
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