Rich Rodriguez Reveals Honest Opinion of Former WVU Head Coach Neal Brown

The Neal Brown era at West Virginia is one Mountaineer fans are ready to bury in the past forever. Under his leadership, the Mountaineers produced four losing seasons in six years and only won more than six games in a season once (2023). It goes down as the worst stretch in Mountaineer football since the Frank Cignetti era in the mid-late 70s.

All that being said, there's still a lot of respect for the former Mountaineer head coach in the industry, including from current WVU head coach Rich Rodriguez. On Tuesday, Rodriguez was asked about the progression of the players he inherited, and instead of going deep into detail about the players, he turned it into crediting Brown and his staff.

“They had good coaches here. Neal Brown’s a good football coach. Sometimes things didn’t come together or you get a little unlucky, or it just didn’t click at the time he wanted it to click and all that. But Neal didn’t get to this level as a head coach not being a good football coach. He’s a good football coach. There’s a lot of factors that go into you being able to win.”

There were indeed many things that Brown had to endure during his time in Morgantown, from the integration of the transfer portal and NIL to dealing with the pandemic, which impacted recruiting for a couple of years. Every coach in the country had to deal with it, but for all of that to happen at the start of a tenure was certainly a challenge.

Brown is now a special assistant to the head coach, Steve Sarkisian, at Texas.

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