Following WVU Football’s 52-15 loss against Texas Tech University Saturday, Head Coach Neal Brown spoke in a postgame press conference, reflecting on the loss and the Mountaineers’ regular season play.
WVU trailed Texas Tech 35-3 heading into halftime. Brown said the team’s performance in “all three phases” of the game was poor and it was hard to overcome the deficit.
“Good enough in the first half. I thought our guys competed in the second half, but just all three phases in the first half, just very poor. … If you look at the final stats, you’re like, ‘Well, they’re not that bad’, but we just played so poorly in the first half. Hard to overcome,” Brown said.
Brown said the team knew it would need to score a lot to stay in the game, but it did not capitalize on scoring opportunities.
“We knew we were going to have to get up in the upper 30s, low 40s to win and we just didn’t do that. We had some opportunities, especially early on some third and fourth downs, and you’ve got to be able to convert that,” he said.
Brown said the team needs a break and will bounce back in its upcoming bowl game.
“It’s been a long year and those guys have to listen to all the negativity and it’s been a hard year for them. They need a little bit of a break,” he said. “They need to be able to catch their breath. Positive is that’s not going to be the end. We have another game. We can always finish well in a bowl game. Our guys will bounce back.”
“We had three concussions in the game. I’m not going to name them but I think we lost like seven people during the game,” he said.
WVU finished the regular season with a 6-6 record overall. Brown said the team did not finish with the record it sought out but that it showed resilience throughout the season.
“Our record at the end wasn’t what we hoped for, and I don’t have any problem admitting that it wasn’t what we had hoped for. But I will say this, I thought that over the course of the year, there were times when people were counting us out and our guys bounced back and did some good things,” he said.
WVU finished with a 5-4 record in Big 12 Conference play. Brown said the team lost games this season that they are capable of winning.
“We won five games in this league. We wanted to win more. There were some games there that we didn’t win that we’re capable of winning. I don’t think that we’re just miles away but there’s critical areas where we have to improve,” he said.
