Between The Eers: The Day After Oklahoma
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00:00 Hello everybody and welcome into between the ears.
00:12 It is the morning after, the day after, whatever we want to call it here.
00:15 I'm a little late here today.
00:18 Had some stuff that popped up this morning, so couldn't get this recorded until now.
00:22 But anyways, diving deeper into this West Virginia loss 59-20 to Oklahoma.
00:32 This is more of a big picture thing because I really want to get into the optics of this
00:37 season and the optics of how a record may not necessarily tell the full picture.
00:48 As you well know, Ren Baker said probably time and time again this offseason that he
00:54 wasn't going to put a win total on Neil Brown or over Neil Brown's head to say, "Hey, if
01:02 you hit this mark, your job is safe and you're going to be the Mountaineers head coach for
01:09 the future," and so on and so forth.
01:12 There's a reason why he said that and even explained it because you can have an eight
01:18 and four season, which is very possible right now for West Virginia.
01:21 They got Cincinnati and Baylor to close out the year, two games they should be able to
01:26 win, but you can still feel bad about a team and its direction after an eight and four
01:31 season, much like you can feel pretty good about a team's trajectory after a five and
01:37 seven season.
01:40 It all depends on how the season goes, the flow of those games, how those games were
01:45 won and how they were lost.
01:50 If you have a five and one season, you think, "How can you be any way positive about that?"
01:55 Well, if things started off bad, you have a young team, suffered some injuries, just
02:00 got behind the eight ball early on, then you finish the year, say one in three of your
02:05 last four, you feel like, "Okay, there's still something that's there that you can build
02:10 on."
02:11 It's every time with Neil Brown, every time he gets right there, right at the doorstep,
02:20 he's at the one yard line, just like the Mountaineer offense was last night.
02:24 They had three cracks at it at the one yard line to punch in and get in the end zone.
02:29 Couldn't do it.
02:30 Much like how Neil Brown is at the one yard line multiple times this off season of putting
02:37 these rumors or these hot seat conversations to bed and saying, "This is my job," he gets
02:44 stuffed at the goal line.
02:46 I don't understand how you don't have your team ready to play a big time football game
02:54 with big time ramifications.
02:56 You are in the Big 12 title race.
02:59 You can slam that 14 stuff into the heads of these kids all season long, but when you
03:07 show up and put a performance like this out there, that's a red flag.
03:15 You may have not expected to be in this position, or maybe I should say a lot of people didn't
03:21 expect you to be in this position, but when you get there, you got to continue to prove
03:26 people wrong, not say, "Oh, this is why there was doubt.
03:29 This is why there was concern.
03:31 This is why this guy was coaching for his job coming into the season."
03:36 When you have your team playing for a spot to get in the Big 12 title game, you can't
03:44 come out and lay an egg.
03:47 You just can't.
03:50 You're having to make up for a coaching blunder from almost a month or so ago in Houston.
03:59 You should never lose to Houston.
04:02 They're the worst team in the league.
04:06 How do I know that?
04:07 Well, they just lost to the worst team in the league, so that makes them the new worst
04:09 team.
04:12 You lost to a team that is going to finish 14th, more than likely, in the Big 12 Conference
04:20 out of a bye week.
04:23 I know we've tried to put that one to bed.
04:25 I know I've tried to not talk about that as much, but we're talking about the 50,000-foot
04:30 view here of this season.
04:35 When you go back and look at the little things that cost West Virginia these games, man,
04:40 like it's the Houston game, you should never have that much issues defensively, injuries
04:49 or not, coming out of a bye week against the worst team in the conference.
04:58 You fast forward to Oklahoma State, you should be coming out much like how Oklahoma did last
05:04 night, playing pissed off, ready to go.
05:09 It's a homecoming game.
05:11 It's a game you absolutely need to win.
05:15 And you come out and run into your own punter.
05:20 First off, Oklahoma State muffs the punt.
05:24 You get the ball back in great field position.
05:27 And then two plays later, boom, ball's out of Cole Taylor's hand and into Oklahoma State
05:31 defenders' hands, going the other way.
05:36 You have, again, running into the punter.
05:39 The defense didn't want to tackle Wally Gordon for whatever reason.
05:42 This is the same defense that we talked about in the first month of the year as maybe being
05:47 the best defensive front seven that Jordan Leslie has had.
05:53 What the hell happened?
05:56 Those are two games, very winnable.
06:00 Should have won the Houston game, no sweat at all.
06:03 And then you still, you put yourself in a hole.
06:07 You chipped away, you chipped away, and you found a way to take the lead late, only to
06:12 give it up on a Hail Mary.
06:16 Bad teaching points in that Hail Mary, oh my goodness.
06:20 But you lose the Houston game, you follow that up with a loss to Oklahoma State, you
06:26 beat a couple of teams that have no business hanging around with you, and then you show
06:32 up in Norman, or did they show up?
06:36 I don't know.
06:38 The offense went right down the field to Gordon, and after that, it was over with.
06:45 So you look at this schedule, and this is exactly what I'm trying to get to here today,
06:53 my point, in that the optics of an eight and four season may not be that great when you
07:00 really kind of dive into it.
07:04 You lose to Penn State, there's no shame in that.
07:07 You actually kind of hung with them for most of the game.
07:10 They scored a late touchdown because James Franklin likes to be, you know, and run up
07:18 the score there.
07:19 Duquesne, it's Duquesne, man.
07:23 Nothing you can really say about that.
07:25 Pitt is two and eight.
07:28 You beat them with your backup quarterback.
07:34 I give you props there, which we did.
07:36 We did, and we have all season long.
07:39 Texas Tech, you beat them again with your backup quarterback.
07:42 Tip of the hat there, but they also lost their starting quarterback in that game.
07:48 So Texas Tech's a five and five team that's been without their starting quarterback pretty
07:53 much since the West Virginia game on.
07:56 TCU has clearly taken a step back from their national championship team that they had a
08:01 year ago.
08:04 You lose to Houston, again, the worst team in the conference.
08:08 Okay.
08:09 One of the worst teams in the conference, at least, depending on who you ask.
08:18 Loses to Oklahoma State, who is, even though they got boat raced by UCF, one of the top
08:26 teams in the Big 12.
08:29 You beat UCF, you beat BYU, and get throttled at Oklahoma.
08:37 So if we're looking at this, or if I'm looking at this correctly, there is not one, there's
08:44 one team on this entire schedule, one team that has a winning record.
08:55 Actually no, TCU's four and six, BYU lost last night, they're five and five, Central
09:02 Florida, five and five.
09:09 So they've not beaten a team that currently has a winning record.
09:16 I'm just kind of glancing over that.
09:19 Maybe it is one team, went over that quickly, but here's my thing with Neil.
09:28 He's got to take that ball that's at the one yard line, because it's still there, may move
09:33 back to the two, but he's got to take that ball and put it in the end zone before this
09:42 thing blows up on him.
09:45 You have a great, a great opportunity to go eight and four, go to a bowl game, and get
09:55 to nine wins.
09:57 If you do that, you shut people like me up, you shut the fans up that are not believing
10:06 in the climb or trusting the climb, you're laying all those rumors and conversations
10:13 to bed.
10:16 But, but if he loses, or if West Virginia loses to Cincinnati and/or Baylor, there's
10:31 going to be a lot more of those conversations being had.
10:37 I'm not ready to say that Neil is on the hot seat just yet, because I don't think he is
10:43 right now, I really don't.
10:46 I think it's going to take a lot for him to be fired at this point.
10:52 But again, it's hard to really understand because we don't know what Wren's thinking
10:58 is.
10:59 He has not made a coaching decision since he's been here in terms of moving on from
11:05 a coach.
11:06 He's not fired a coach since he's been here.
11:09 So we don't know how his thinking process works, what he's looking for.
11:15 And with such wide goalposts, it's hard to really understand.
11:21 But from the fans' perspective, and from ours perspective in the media, it's a really gray
11:29 area right now.
11:32 And until he gets that seventh and eighth win, it's going to stay in that little gray
11:37 area.
11:38 But man, I'm telling you, if you lose one of these two games, it's going to be a conversation
11:49 that's going to be talked about all of the month of December.
11:55 Or I shouldn't say all of, but maybe most of the month of December.
12:02 So let me know what you guys think in the comments here on YouTube.
12:07 If you're watching this there, if not, let us know your thoughts on Twitter or X, whatever
12:13 they call it, about what Neil Brown needs to do in order to remain as the head coach
12:21 at WVU.
12:22 Again, I don't think he's on the hot seat yet.
12:25 He can sure as hell coach his way onto there with a loss next week to Cincinnati, and damn
12:31 sure can coach his way on there with a loss to Baylor.
12:35 It's close, but he's also this close to just saving his job as well.
12:40 So thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Between the Ears here on the day
12:45 after Oklahoma.
12:47 I'm Scott McCallum.
12:48 Make sure you hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Mountaineers Now, and follow us on
12:53 X at Mountaineers Now as well.
12:56 We'll be back here in a few days to discuss how West Virginia can beat Cincinnati.
13:01 We also have our walkthrough game day preview show, breaking down the Mountaineers and the
13:06 Bearcats.
13:08 And we'll also have a couple of end of gun episodes that you can catch this week on our
13:14 site at Mountaineers Now featuring Judge Running, Wesley Uhler, myself, and Owen Schmidt, the
13:20 Runway Beer Truck.
13:21 So make sure you follow us.
13:23 Hit that subscribe button so you know when we're dropping new videos, and we'll see you
13:27 guys here in a couple of days.