Shane Lyons Answers Whether or Not He Would Fire Neal Brown if He Were Still WVU AD

Things in Morgantown are messy, to say the least. The football program has taken a turn for the worse and is in the midst of it worst four-year period it has seen this century. Because of that, athletic director Shane Lyons was fired and there has been speculation that head football coach Neal Brown might be next.

During a wild tell-all interview with Hoppy Kercheval of Metro News, Lyons was asked point blank if he would fire Neal Brown had he not been fired himself.

"Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, again, you know, people don't see behind the scenes which an athletic director you do so you look at it, and I think last week really proved a point which I felt strongly when I was athletic director that he had not lost this team. And that's the big thing while you're in the locker room, you're around the student-athletes and in they played very, very hard Saturday at a tough place to play. You know, Oklahoma State, you know, hadn't lost a home game in two years. So that just tells you how difficult it is so you know, the players played extremely hard. It was a great win. And again, is it where we need to be? The answer's no. I mean, you know, we were looking at probably seven or eight wins this year. So did they meet our expectations? No. Did it meet Neal Brown's expectations? No. Same time a couple plays that go on our way early in the season against Kansas and against Pitt, we could be sitting at seven wins. We wouldn't be having this conversation in my opinion today. So Neal Brown is you know, I look at it this way, the first couple of years. And you know what Neal Brown took over and the players he had his first couple years and plus, adding COVID in there. I honestly look at this as year two for Neal Brown, not year four. Year two. And and that's, you know, it's kind of resetting that and that that was part of because the contract extension was resetting it to say okay, let's start, you know, going forward from here, and he's constantly building this thing. And you make a coaching change... you're taking three years, back backwards steps, you're not you're not moving forward, you're going backwards. You're gonna lose kids to the portal. You're gonna lose a very good recruiting class that he has right now. And he may have lose some of those kids now, because of the continued talk about him being fired. That doesn't help the situation at all, especially in the world that we live in in recruiting. So, do I think that, you know, he deserves a chance that's not my decision, but if I was still sitting in this chair today, And this isn't about a contract. This is about the issue at hand of our football program, are we constantly going to get better? The answer is yes. If you make a coaching change, you're taking a couple years back.

"I think he checks every box that we're looking for in a head coach. Unfortunately, the big box is he needs to win more football games, and I believe that's coming in the future. But you know, right now he's sitting right near 500 record a little bit below 500. But she's looking at it to say, can we build off of this? And I think the answer is yes, it can be built off of it's a process. It's not going to happen instantaneously. Especially some of the the players that he inherited and so on. It's gonna take a lot longer than what people look at three or four years."

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