WVU’s loss to Penn State was like an unexpectedly bad Christmas morning
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) — When one looks for an analogy out of life to what West Virginia’s football team is going through this week after losing to Penn State in its 2024 season opener, 34-12, one may think back to his childhood years, to the expectations he had at age 4 or 6 or 8 as Christmas approached.
There was so much hype, such high expectations leading up to this opening game. The tree was up, the lights were strung, Pat McAfee was in the role of Santa Claus.
The Mountaineers had written out their Christmas list for Santa, maybe even sat in his lap and asked him for that bicycle he wanted if he was of that age or even, if older, for the college football video game that everyone else was playing.
Sleep didn’t come easily on Friday night and when they went to look under the tree … well, let’s just say the packages weren’t at all what they expected.
Defeat wasn’t on the gift list and that can take a while to get over but in college football, every Saturday is Christmas.
There’s a game to be played, this weekend it being against FBS opponent Albany, and then there’s Pitt the next week up I-79 in Pittsburgh and, well, how do you approach the rehabilitation from such an emotional defeat?
“It didn’t go the way you wanted it to go and there’s some deflating that goes into that. You feel, whether you are a player or a coach, you have a team good enough to win the game, then you just don’t play well. That’s deflating, but this is also a business and you got another game to play,” Coach Neal Brown explained in his weekly Monday press conference.
“You can feel sorry for yourself until about right now,” Brown continued, the clock by this time pushing 1:40 p.m. on Monday. “It’s done. You move on. For me, this is like the last bit of the mourning. I talk about it with you all (media) and I’m done and move on, go into the bunker and get ready for Albany.”
He’d studied it, his assistants have studied it, his players have been presented with it. That was now out of the way.
“You got to flush it,” Brown stressed, a rather truly descriptive term for what’s left after a loss like Saturday’s. “You move on, but you’ve got to learn from it. If you don’t learn from it, then you will repeat it. There were some mistakes we made in our preparation; some mistakes we made in our execution that cannot happen again whether it’s Albany, Pitt, Kansas … you have to go on.
“We play a really tough schedule. We play a lot of good football teams, so we have to correct those things.”
Brown discounts the chance of the air having leaked out of the balloon from one bad performance that led to a loss.
“To me, us not being ready to play there is 0% chance of,” he said. “We have enough depth now that if a guy is not ready to play, we are going to get him out. We only have one game this week. We’ll get back to work tomorrow. We’ll have two good practices and play considerably better Saturday versus a team we have a lot of respect for.”
Make no doubt, this was a performance the coaches and the fans did expect to see of the players and certainly it was the last thing any of the players expected out of their month-long fall camp.
“It was a great atmosphere on Saturday, We just didn’t deliver. We didn’t play well enough to beat a quality opponent. I’m not sure we played well enough to beat a sub-par opponent. We just did not play very good football,” Brown said.
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