The headline here is accurate. Following an embarrassing 37-point loss to Texas Tech in the 2024 regular season finale, the West Virginia Mountaineers have decided to fire head coach Neal Brown, according to Matt Zenitz of 247Sports. However, Brown's dismissal was on the table long before the Mountaineers suffered what turned out to be the third-worst loss in the embattled former coach's entire six year tenure in Morgantown.
West Virginia went 37-35 under Neal Brown, and they claimed a Duke's Mayo Bowl win last December. But a viral mayonnaise shower wasn't enough for Brown to last more than one season longer with the Mountaineers. Even though the Mountaineers finished 6-6 and are bowl eligible for the fourth time in six years, there's a sense that this program which was the class of the Big East over the conference's final ten seasons of existence, is rapidly falling behind the rest of the Big 12.
Ahead of the season, West Virginia was projected to finish 7th in the newly-expanded 16-team Big 12 conference. At season's end, the Mountaineers were in 9th place, and given how poorly their season finale against Texas Tech went, it feels like a much worse finish than it actually was.
At one point early on, West Virginia and Texas Tech were tied at 3 points apiece, but the Raiders would go on a 32-0 scoring run and bust the game wide open by halftime.
“I don’t think that the first half of football necessarily defines who our players are, who we are as individuals, or who we are as a team,” Brown said after West Virginia's 52-15 loss, per the Associated Press. “But we’re not pleased with that.”
Fixing these issues for the 2025 season won't be Neal Brown's problem. However, the 44-year-old coach, who went 35-16 as the head coach at Troy before accepting the job at West Virginia, will likely find himself on another team's offensive coaching staff next season with a whole new set of issues to combat.