Penn State running back Keitron Allen (13) runs for a touchdown against West Virginia during the first half of an NCAA college football game in Morgantown, West Virginia, Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Kathleen Batten)
MORGANTOWN — If you try to draw a parallel to what the West Virginia football team is going through this week after losing 34-12 to Penn State in the 2024 season opener, you might be thinking back to the expectations you had when you were 4 or 6 or 8 as Christmas approached. There was so much anticipation and so much hype leading up to this opener. The tree was decorated, the lights were strung up, Pat McAfee was playing Santa Claus. Mountaineers players wrote out Christmas lists for Santa, maybe even sat on his lap and asked for the bike they wanted if they were that age, or the college football video game everyone else was playing if they were older. They had a hard time sleeping Friday night, and when they went to look under the tree… well, let’s just say the package was not at all what they were expecting. A loss isn’t on the gift list, and it might take a while to get over it, but in college football, every Saturday is Christmas. They have a game this weekend against FBS opponent Albany, and the following week they’ll face Pittsburgh on I-79 in Pittsburgh. So how do they go about rehabbing from such an emotional loss?
“It didn’t go the way I wanted it to and I was a little disappointed. Whether you’re a player or a coach, you have a team that’s good enough to win games and I just didn’t play well. It’s disappointing, but it’s a business and we have to play again.” Manager Neil Brown explained this at his weekly press conference on Monday.
“You can’t feel sorry for yourself until now.” Brown continued, “At this point the clock read 1:40pm on Monday afternoon.”
“It’s over. I have no choice but to move on. This is kind of my final mourning period. I’m going to talk to you guys (the media) about this and then I’m going to put it behind me and move on, go into shelter and get ready for Albany.”
He studied it, his assistants studied it, he presented it to his players, problem solved.
“I have to flush it.” Brown highlighted the words that aptly describe what remains after a loss like Saturday’s: “You can move on, but you have to learn from it. If you don’t learn from it, you’re going to do it again. We made mistakes in our preparation. We made mistakes against Albany, Pittsburgh, Kansas, we made mistakes in our execution that we can’t make again. We have to move on.”
“We’ve got a really tough schedule. We’re playing a lot of good football teams, so we’ve got to fix those things.”
Brown denies that one bad performance could have let the air out of the balloon, leading to the defeat.
“To me, there’s zero percent chance we won’t be ready to play there.” He said. “Right now we have a good depth pool, so if a guy isn’t fit to play, we’re going to take him out. We only have one game this week, we practice again tomorrow, we’ll have two good practices and then on Saturday we’ll play a team that we respect a lot and play pretty well.”
Without a doubt, this was the performance the coaches and fans expected from the players and no doubt the last thing the players expected to see after a month of fall training.
“There was a great atmosphere on Saturday but we didn’t live up to expectations. We didn’t play well enough to beat a good opponent. I don’t know if we did well enough to beat a weaker opponent. We just didn’t play good football.” Brown said.
“We were very shaky in two of the three phases. As a veteran team, our performance was disappointing. I take responsibility. I take responsibility for the results on the field. I wasn’t very excited about it and I don’t think the fans were either.”
But after the long rain-delayed game finally concluded, the coach was adamant it was no disaster.
“It doesn’t determine our fate. I told you guys a week ago.” “The frustrating thing is we worked hard to get to a place on a national stage and it didn’t pay off. There’s no reason to deny that. That’s the reality,” Brown said. “The players saw what happened today. We have to learn from it. We have to embrace it and grow from it. That’s where we are right now. There’s still a lot of season to go. There have been many good teams in West Virginia history that came back from a loss to Penn State and had a special year. There’s no reason this team can’t do that too.
“We’ll bounce back. Penn State has a good football team. We have a good football team. It starts this week. We just have to go out there and show it.”
Brown said the statistics may paint an uglier picture than has been painted so far, something he’ll address as the week progresses, but there were also some positives to build on top of the hurt buried in the ashes of the defeat.
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