What Neal Brown Said Following the Loss to Oklahoma

WVU head coach Neal Brown met with the media after falling to the Oklahoma Sooners.

Opening statement

"Great college football game, great college atmosphere. Credit Oklahoma for pulling it out in the end. I love our guys. I love our staff and I love our players. I thought they fought their ass off really for four quarters. That was a tough, physical football game. I thought we went toe to toe with Oklahoma here in their backyard. If you look at it, we had chances. We just ran out of time. Tough loss but proud of our guys."

The job of the defense

"I thought our defensive players and our defensive staff played their tail off. We felt good about it coming in. As you look at our conference since we joined it in 2012, Oklahoma has been the team to beat. When you look at it, we tried outscoring them and that didn't work. So when we got here, we worked on trying to put the foundation on how we want to build this thing to give us an opportunity to win our league, we felt like we had to play great defense. If you go back to when we lost to Texas Tech in 2019, since then we've played great defense minus a game or two."

Thoughts on the offense

"I thought offensively too, we battled. I think when we go back and look at it, there's going to be three or four opportunities where we had to go win the game and you never know when those plays are going to be. We didn't get it done. We were able to control the clock, we were able to get first downs. When we got into the red zone, we were effective. The one issue that we knew if we got into it would be 3rd and long. We got in too many of those in the 2nd and 3rd quarters. It's tough against that level of a defensive line."

Quarterback usage

"We had a plan when we were going to use it. Garrett had a fumble there early and they ruled him down. But we had a series of plays that we liked. Some were good and some weren't. We knew that down in the red zone areas, we wanted to play him. We had a drive there in the 2nd quarter we wanted him in. But I thought he did some really good things, made some really good decisions. I thought Jarret battled. We left some battles out there for him too."

If a 2-QB system will continue to be used

"I think it's going to be like that. I think for where we're at and what we need to do, it's going to be a mixture of both. It's kind of the way I felt like it was going to be maybe going into the spring and Garrett didn't materialize like we thought he was going to. But he's been playing better, so I think it's going to be a mixture."

Bad snap in 4th quarter

"Here's the thing, we don't have a better kid or person in our program than Zach Frazier. I'll take him every day. Regardless if we're playing Oklahoma or wherever we're going. We got some hurt kids in the locker room that nobody is more hurt than him. You're hurt because you invest. There's nobody else that's got a more personal investment than Zach Frazier. I'm not sure what happened. We hadn't had a bad snap up until that point. I'm sure the noise was a factor. I'm not exactly sure but that was uncharacteristic and even with that, we still had chances."

Overall feelings on the loss

"I hurt in the pit of my stomach for our players. I hurt because we had a plan, we came in here we fought against a team that's at the top year in and year out of the recruiting rankings. Year in and year out they're top five or ten in the country. They've been dominant in our league and they've been dominant at home for the most part. We had an opportunity to win and we just didn't. We just didn't. That's hard when you invest. We had a great week, great prep. The hope is we learn from this so when we get back in this situation, which we will. There's going to be a ton of these games that come down to the end."

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