What Neal Brown Said Following the Loss to Texas Tech

The West Virginia Mountaineers (6-6, 5-4) were hammered in the season finale by the Texas Tech Red Raiders (8-4, 6-3) Saturday afternoon 52-15.

Head coach Neal Brown met with the media following the game and provided instant analysis of the game.

Opening statement

Just not good enough in the first half. I thought our guys competed in the second half but just all three phases in the first half – just very poor.

We handled the travel fine. We played well on the road. We practiced pretty well this week. In winning time in the first half, we just did not compete.

It wasn’t good enough – not hiding from that. I don’t think the first half of football necessarily defines who they are, who we are as individuals or who we are as a team but not pleased with that.

Offense assessment

A slow start. We had a missed opportunity on fourth down. We had Huddy (redshirt sophomore receiver Hudson Clement) open, we didn’t connect on that. That would have been play. I don’t know if we win, its definitely not that ass whooping it ended up being.

So, just too many negative plays offensively. If you look at the final stats, your like, ‘Wow, they’re not that bad.’ We just played so poorly in the first half, its hard to overcome.

If you look at the sacks and it wasn’t just one person. I think the running backs gave up two sacks. We had a tight end give up pressure. We had an o-lineman, and then some TFLs. They were moving the front, which we anticipated – they probably moved it a little more than they have but we didn’t handle some of those run throughs very well.

Defense's performance

This is just a matchup. They got us space and we had several injuries in the game too and that’s not an excuse that’s just the truth. We had several injuries early in the second quarter and they were just better than us in space, and so we missed a lot of tackles. They got the ball out of their hands. We didn’t play as well up front as we have this year.

West Virginia’s 27 rushing yards in the first half.

Movement and they had some edge pressure. Its one of those where we were close to kicking out of them and there’s been times where we kicked out of them, whether its quarterback or running back. We kicked out of some of them in the second half – Jahiem got going. And then, Garrett got an ankle there early and he wasn’t able to kick out of some of those explosive runs that he normally does. You got to credit them. They did some different things defensively, but we were close but never could kick out of tackle there.