Quick Hits: Areas of Concern, Moving Past Penn State + More

WVU head coach Neal Brown gives final thoughts on loss to Penn State.

Schuyler Callihan | Sep 2, 2024

Ben Queen-USA TODAY Sports

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West Virginia Mountaineers

Monday afternoon, West Virginia head football coach Neal Brown met with the media to discuss his final thoughts on the loss to Penn State and explains what needs to improve heading into this week's game against Albany.

Main takeaway from loss to Penn State

“We didn’t coach or play well enough to beat a quality opponent. I’m not sure we could have beat a subpar opponent on Saturday. We just did not play very good football. Very erratic in two out of three phases. For a veteran team, just disappointed in how we performed. I take ownership of it. The product on the field is on me and I wasn’t very fired up about it, and I’m sure our fans weren’t very fired up about it.”

Problems defensively

“I think stats tell the story in this game. They don’t always do, but they did in this game for sure. Our rushing defense was not good, we gave up a lot of explosive runs, a lot of quarterback scrambles. If you go back and rewatch the game, the explosives are what killed us. That, and the quarterback run game and a lot of those are on scrambles. We just generated zero pressure and he’s a quarterback that struggled with pressure coming in and we just didn’t generate any.”

Problems offensively

“Below our standards. The turnovers, we had ball issues repeatedly and you’re not going to be beat quality people. That’s something we didn’t do last year and we put the ball on the ground a couple more times. That’s just bad football. We struggled with just basic, functioning football. As bad as we played, if we just scored in the red zone, then we have a ball game. We had it in the red zone the exact same amount of times they did. We were 1/4 there. That’s the game right there. We had four drops on potential explosive plays with guys that usually make those and that hadn’t been an issue for us. Just disappointing because we got the talent to play a lot better than that.”

How to move past the Penn State game

“It’s not going to make or break us. I think I told you that a week ago. The frustrating thing is you work to get to a point where you play a game that’s on a national stage and we just didn’t produce. There’s no reason to be in denial about it. It is what it is. Our season is still in front of us. There’s been a lot of good West Virginia teams that got beat by Penn State in its history and bounced back and have had special years and there’s no reason why this team can’t do the same.”

The running game

“We didn’t do as poor job running the football as the numbers show. Now, they are what they are. I’m not trying to convince you that numbers are lying. But we had -16 on the snap that hit the receiver. The hot snap was -11, so we had -27. And then on the pass play where Garrett fumbled was another -7 or 8, so you add all that minus yardage and it looks worse than it actually was. I thought we did a really good job on their edge people. Their quickness on the interior bothered us some, but I thought we got expansion on their ends, I thought we got good movement.”

Takeaways from the passing game

“Not real fired up but we dropped more ball than we did a year ago. If you think about it, the first play of the game, that would have been a 30+ yard play. We missed one on a seam ball. The ball gets knocked out of Kole (Taylor’s) hands, and then there’s another one where we got our hands on and those are all minimum 15-yard plus gains. There were plays there, we didn’t make them. Now, we’re not going to bail out of it after just one game, but there wasn’t the improvement that we were expecting to see.”

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