Is West Virginia football on quit watch?

After a second consecutive loss this past Saturday dropped West Virginia to 3-4 overall on the season, the seat Mountaineers' Head Coach Neal Brown sits on has rarely been as hot as it is now. Maybe not in terms of his relationship with the administration -- I have no inside knowledge on that situation so I won't speculate -- but for certain in terms of his relationship with the fans.

Brown is now 3-17 against ranked opponents during his tenure in Morgantown, and has failed to beat an FBS team in the regular season that has finished the year with 7 or more wins. He is 34-33 in his overall tenure, managing just two winning seasons in five years -- whether he can make it three winning seasons in six years remains to be seen, but the results of the last two WVU games are trending in the wrong direction.

Antipathy amongst the fanbase is running high -- members of Mountaineer Nation are again calling online for Brown to lose his job, and fans are even donning brown paper bags inside Milan Puskar Stadium. Fans have officially launched a website to stump for the firing of Brown, and while plans didn't come to fruition last weekend, others are attempting to pay a pilot to fire a 'Fire Neal Brown' banner over Milan Puskar during a home game.

But in my opinion, it isn't necessarily the fans losing confidence that Brown should be primarily concerned about, but rather his own locker room.

The 45-18 defeat against Kansas State is the worst loss of the season yet in terms of margin of defeat, and the sixth-worse of Neal Brown's tenure. Outside of last season's beating at the hands of Oklahoma , it's the worst loss for the program since October of 2022. And while at least one loss per season of this nature seems to be par for the course during the Brown era, this is the first time since 2019 that such a large loss has served as the bookend for back-to-back losses.

And honestly, the eye test during the second half of play against Kansas State was even more concerning than those fun figures. The team was down a touchdown to the Wildcats late in the second quarter despite two Garrett Greene interceptions putting them in a hole early. They then watched a drive to tie the game stall with a turnover on downs in the final seconds of the half as a controversial play call was poorly executed by Greene.

From there, the Mountaineers were outscored 28-8 to end the game and looked relatively lifeless in terms of their competitive drive. Blame it on a game riddled with countless WVU injuries -- they certainly didn't help -- but watching on Saturday, I couldn't help but feel like I was watching a team that knew it was already beaten.

Combine this with Brown dropping a quote during last week's press conference about how fans should continue turning out despite losses for the fun environment and pre-game tailgates and it might spell out some deeper issues inside the locker room. Sure, that quip infuriated fans who spend their hard-earned money to support a team not consistently finding success on the field.

But imagine how it feels to hear that come from the mouth of your head coach who is supposed to be the one responsible for leading you to victory each week. Once, as a high school sophomore, I had a coach's Thursday afternoon speech before a rivalry game turn sour. The rival was a much bigger school and routinely beat us in previous encounters -- our coach told us that year he didn't expect us to win, as long as we competed. That certainly didn't fire us up headed into the game -- we loss, and we mocked our coach for the rest of our high school career for it.

I have to imagine having a coach asked by local press to give the fans a reason to come out and support the team and hearing the answer revolve around the tailgating atmosphere must not sound incredibly different the WVU's locker room -- if he believes we can beat Kansas State and future opponents, why isn't that the reason he gives to tell fans to come out? If we've devolved to the atmosphere being the selling point, he clearly must not think the team is capable of a win.

So doubt likely starts to creep in there -- it expands with a poor first-half effort against Kansas State that results in a lifeless second-half effort and one of the worst losses for the team in the past five years to cap a stretch of back-to-back losses that puts your backs against the wall. Now, one begins to wonder exactly how many of the players will continue to "Trust the Climb" as Brown likes to say.

Much of this is opinion, an analysis by a former high school and college football athlete who has been in football locker rooms as a player and a journalist who has covered football from high school to Division 2 to Divison 1 over the past seven years. I've seen what it looks like to be in a locker room that has quit on a coach, and I've been a member of one personally. And now I worry, despite the players at WVU having bought into Brown's message for years at this point, how long they'll continue to buy what is being sold.