West Virginia fired football coach Neal Brown, the school announced Sunday, after the Mountaineers lost 52-15 to Texas Tech on Saturday to finish the regular season 6-6.
Since his arrival in Morgantown in 2019, Brown led the team to a 37-35 overall record but was 25-28 in the Big 12. West Virginia reached bowl eligibility — its fourth time doing so in Brown’s six seasons — with its sixth victory against UCF on Nov. 23, but none of the teams the Mountaineers triumphed over had won more than five games heading into the final weekend of the regular season.
Brown took the Mountaineers to a 9-4 record last year, but it was his only season with more than six wins.
West Virginia is one of just three Power 4 schools that hasn’t been ranked in the AP Top 25 since 2019, along with Rutgers and Texas Tech.
Brown was previously the head coach at Troy, where he went 35-16 in four seasons.
Why did WVU make this move now?
When Wren Baker took the West Virginia athletic director job in November 2022, he elected to retain Brown despite two consecutive losing seasons and plenty of fans clamoring to move on. That decision looked wise when Brown and the Mountaineers went a surprising 9-4 in 2023, but it ended up delaying a decision that Baker felt compelled to make after a 6-6 record in 2024.
Baker has talked about how important and impactful the job of head football coach at West Virginia is, in a state with no other power-conference schools or professional teams, and how much he respected Brown’s understanding and embrace of that responsibility on and off the field But that responsibility also carries the pressure of putting a winning, inspiring team out there that the whole state can get behind. Aside from the 2023 season, Brown had fallen short of that goal with the Mountaineers. Enough so that Baker and WVU stakeholders were willing to pay Brown’s remaining buyout of nearly $10 million and reset the program, even with the financial burden of the House v. NCAA settlement and revenue sharing looming straight ahead. — Justin Williams
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