West Virginia football coach Neal Brown offers thoughts of difficult 2024 schedule

If West Virginia football wants to find a second-consecutive winning season under sixth-year head coach Neal Brown, they will need to bring their A-game in 2024. 

Why? Because their schedule this fall is brutal.

The Mountaineers will face five of the top six projected teams in the league’s preseason media poll over a five-game stretch in September and October. Meanwhile, national analyst Phil Steele ranks the team’s schedule the seventh toughest at the FBS level this season, with 11 of WVU’s 12 opponents coming from a Power 4 conference.

"The schedule is to be determined," Brown said Wednesday. "Everybody was whining about last year's schedule, and in hindsight, if you remember we opened up with Penn State, a top-10 team, and we played Pitt who was on a lot of people's top-25 lists and then Texas Tech came here, and they were preseason top 25.”

Brown understands how difficult the schedule lines up headed into the season, but he also took some time to illuminate the portions of the schedule that he actually finds appealing and how he thinks it could work in his team’s favor.

"On paper, it looks really hard, and our league is extremely deep," Brown said. "I will say this about our schedule: I like where our bye weeks are. We've got two long trips to Lubbock and to Tucson, but the Lubbock trip is at the end of the year and the Tucson trip will have a bye week post, so we are protected a little bit on that, so that helps. It's to be determined, but there are some really good teams on there."