Neal Brown Opens Up About Conversations He's Had During Current Slide
The first four years of the Neal Brown era have not gone as many would have hoped, including Brown himself. With just three games left in the season, the Mountaineers have a 3-6 (1-5) record and sit dead last in the Big 12 Conference. Unless WVU is able to rattle off three wins and win a bowl game, it will mark the third losing season in four years. Prior to Brown's arrival, there were only two other occurrences where WVU finished with a losing season this century (2001, 2013).
"I hate losing. Like, it makes everything difficult to deal with," said Brown during his press conference on Tuesday. "I hate it because the people in this building are investing a lot. I hate it because I haven't had to really experience that very often. Now, what people say doesn't necessarily affect me but the losing, like that, that's painful to go through. I think there's a lot more things out there that people have to be down about. When I come into this building, I refuse to be negative. I refuse to let anybody in here feel sorry for ourselves as coaches or as players. And the bottom line is, we're going to do everything we can to prepare and go win a game this week. That's the focus. To me, I just kind of get lost in the work. I think failure is temporary unless you accept it. I just refuse to accept it."
Although it's a nice phrase, failure hasn't been temporary in Brown's tenure at WVU. As a matter of fact, that's pretty much all it has been to this point. They've spent zero weeks ranked in the AP Top 25 rankings and have finished no higher than fifth in the league.
Naturally, as the losses continue to pile up, the fan base's patience wears thin and they are sure to let him know about it on social media. Thankfully, Brown doesn't see much of it because he typically stays off Twitter and all social media for that matter during the season. However, it's not something he can't completely escape from as he still hears a lot of things via his family and players.
"You can't block it," Brown said. "You just have to have real conversations. Dax [his son] is, he's sheltered from them. But my daughters have to deal with it, my wife has to deal with it. For me, and that's where it really is bothersome is when you're talking about my family or really, the families of the staff and to a certain extent too, is the players' families too. What I try to relay to my daughters and my wife, and I talked to our players about this a good bit is -- they're not attacking you personally. Even though they may @ you and it's your Twitter account and all that stuff or Instagram or whatever else they have these days, like, it's not personal. If you allow that to be personal, that's on you. Because most people, and I would say almost all people that are doing that type of activity on social media, they don't know you. They don't know me. So, it would be foolish of me to take that personal. It would be foolish of our players to take that personal. What it is is they're not pleased with the product and that's fair. It's something you got to deal with and if you're going to be in the public eye, you got to deal with the highs and you got to deal with the lows as well."
The results may not be there, but the one thing you do have to acknowledge, like the man or not, is that he gets it. He truly understands what this football program and what this University means to the state of West Virginia. In addition to that, he does everything right off the field. Says all of the right things to the press, is active in the community, has instilled a family atmosphere within the program, and sticks up for his players during all of the aforementioned lows. That, plus his large buyout, could be a couple of reasons why he may remain the head coach at WVU beyond the 2022 season.
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