By Mark Pszonak
West Virginia head coach Neal Brown is on the hot seat after a 5-5 start in Morgantown, so with that there are plenty of rumors about his future. A new one has the Mountaineers already identifying their next head coach and it is an interesting one.
BREAKING 🚨
Sources have indicated that WVU plans to hire UNLV’s Barry Odom to replace Neal Brown at the end of the season.
Wren Baker and Barry Odom worked together at Missouri in 2016.
UNLV is 17-7 under Odom and currently ranked 23rd. pic.twitter.com/Bqw8MvvWJt
— The Collective (@247_Collective) November 20, 2024
Barry Odom is a hot name in the coaching world. Now in his second season in charge of UNLV, he has a 17-7 record with a program that hadn’t won more than seven games in a season since 2000 prior to his arrival. That is an amazing accomplishment and is deserving of attention.
This comes after he was previously the head coach at Missouri from 2016 to 2019 and compiled a 25-25 record. While that didn’t end well, Coach Odom has quickly revitalized his career in Las Vegas.
For West Virginia, it has been a roller coaster ride with Coach Brown. He began the 2023 season on the hotseat but after the Mountaineers enjoyed a 9-4 season the temperature cooled a bit. However, this season everything has once again regressed which has put Coach Brown in the position he currently is in.
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The season started with losses to Penn State and Pittsburgh in their first three games and after the ship righted a bit with a 2-0 start in the Big 12, the Mountaineers have lost three of their last five including a 49-35 loss at home to Baylor on Saturday. West Virginia needs one more win to qualify for a bowl, with games against UCF and Texas Tech remaining, but would that be enough to save his job?
Probably not, as his relationship with the fanbase is extremely negative, which wasn’t helped when he made these comments earlier this season:
Because people are only using the first part of Neal Brown’s answer to my question, here’s the full response.
If he just said the second part, I highly doubt there’s backlash.
I’ll also add I honestly didn’t plan to stir anything up. I thought it was a simple question. 🤷🏻♂️ pic.twitter.com/msR4sbJfHg
— Mike J. Asti (@MikeAsti11) October 15, 2024
“I get that they (the fans) want to win. But what I would say is – did they have a good time? Did they enjoy it? It was a pretty good atmosphere. I’m assuming they had a pretty good time tailgating, so if they’re in the deal for enjoyment then I would come back.”
The fans are no longer having a good time and with that a coaching change is very likely no matter how the last two regular season games of the season go. And when the Mountaineers are back on the market for a head coach, hiring Coach Odom would make sense as he has proven to be deserving of another chance at the P4 level.
