What Neal Brown Said Following the Win Over Baylor

West Virginia University head coach Neal Brown Baylor postgame press conference quick hits

The West Virginia Mountaineers (8-4, 6-3) knocked off the Baylor Bears (3-9, 2-7) Saturday night in the regular season finale 34-31.

Nov 25, 2023; Waco, Texas, USA; West Virginia Mountaineers head coach Neal Brown on the sidelines during the first half of a game against the Baylor Bears at McLane Stadium.  / Raymond Carlin III-USA TODAY Sports

Opening Statement

I thought Baylor competed really, really hard tonight and I think that’s a credit to (Baylor head coach) Dave (Aranda). When you have rough years, and we had it last year, our kids really competed, and we won our finale last year at Oklahoma State and won two of our last three and that set the stage for us to kind of make a turn and went really young and that’s what they’ve done too. They played a lot of really young players and I thought they competed really hard. I thought defensively they had a lot of answers for us in the second half. And then offensively, they kept us off balance. Kind of a bittersweet for me because a guy who was a student coach for us at Kentucky then worked for us for two years, he returned two kicks against us today, Tyler Hanock ,who’s their special teams analyst, so I’ll be happy for him at some point, not right now but at some point, I'll be happy for him.

When you look at this game, we did not play very well. Offensively we did some good things in the first half. Defensively, we really didn’t play much first half-wise, the two kickoffs [returns] were huge, we just got beat on one-on-one blocks and that should never happen. Can't explain it. We’ll watch film on that, but that’s just not good enough. That’s not who we’ve been on special teams and that’s not what we’re going to be moving forward eighter.

In the second half, offensively got behind the chains, got some penalties. And then, in that last drive, we were able to save our timeouts, we used them. Garrett is really good at the two-minute drive. We scored touchdowns with less than a minute and a half both times with zero timeouts. And he’s good. His ability to run, [he] gets the ball downfield vertically. I thought our protection, we five-man protected on the last play that we got Jahiem out up the sideline. That’s a play that we’ve been running going back to the first week of spring practice that we hadn’t ran it in a game yet and we run it every two-minute drill in practice. And so, they hung in there against a really good blitz and picked them up, and we got the ball and Garrett made a great play.

Really proud of our guys. Good win. Gets us to eight, gets us to six conference wins which I think is significant.

Leading 27-14 at halftime

They played well for three quarters last week. They had some drops, but they really got open a lot. Sometimes, for whatever reason, when you have a backup has to come in, people rally around him, and I thought they did that offensively. And they played with really good energy. They had some good defensive answers for us in the second half. We didn’t play as well. Really, for the first time all year, penalties really hurt us and got us behind the chains. It's hard to operate when it's second and 20-soemthing. I thought one of the holding penalties was absolutely not a hold – the one that took the really long run away. That was a really good block by Wyatt (Milum). So, disagree with that one but hey, its hard to officiate. They’re going to miss some too. I promise you, I didn’t have all the right calls. I never felt really comfortable at halftime, but we found a way. 

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