(Football News - Photo Illustration/MetroCreative)

The 2024 West Virginia football season began with great energy and high expectations after an outstanding 9-4 record in 2023. It ended with an embarrassing performance at Texas Tech Saturday, where the Mountaineers simply went through the motions and played with little effort in a 52-15 rout.

With a chance to salvage a winning season and a head coach and staff fighting to keep their jobs, it wasn’t a good look. Then within 24 hours head coach Neal Brown was let go, bringing down the curtain on a disappointing 6-6 season. The wins came against an FCS opponent and five teams with losing records, but when facing better than average teams WVU allowed a 10-point lead at Pittsburgh get away in the waning minutes and lost the five other games by a whopping total of 112 points. It thus wasn’t so much the win-loss record as it was the inability to be even competitive against quality opposition. Four home games saw fans heading for the parking lots long before the game had ended.

Brown is a good man, well-liked, and handled himself with class as leader of the football program. But the 37-35 overall record and only two winning seasons in his six-year tenure made it clear that it was best for everyone involved that a change needed to be made. Coaches at this level are very well paid, but it can be a difficult endeavor on a personal and professional level for many. Winning is hard.

WVU will now soon hire a new leader of its football program, who will have a huge challenge in the new era of recruiting, NIL, and transfer portal. It will be an interesting transition, and patience will be needed.

At least Mountaineer sports fans got a jolt of enthusiasm watching their basketball team win two of three games against strong opposition at a tournament in the Bahamas, including upset wins over No.3 Gonzaga and Arizona. All three games went into OT.

Doing some quick research, I found that approximately 6% of college basketball games go into overtime, which means the odds of playing three OT games in a row are more than 4,000 to 1. Perhaps that is a meaningless anecdote, but after a 37-point football loss what more is one to say?

On the football side the Mountaineers will play in a second tier bowl game which will be a relatively meaningless exercise. With the transfer portal opening for WVU players immediately, one has to wonder how much of a skeleton squad will remain to compete.