West Virginia head coach Neal Brown talks into a headset during the first half of an NCAA football game against Duquesne on Saturday in September. October 9, 2023, Morgantown, West Virginia. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson)
MORGANTOWN, West Virginia. (WV News) – They were once teacher and student, Sonny Dykes and Neal Brown, the two head coaches who will meet when West Virginia travels to Fort Worth for an 8 p.m. game Saturday in a crucial early-season meeting at Big 12 shown on ESPN2. .
TCU’s Dykes Horned Frogs are the national runner-up and are off to a 3-1 start that impacts not only the league but the entire country. Brown’s West Virginia University Mountaineers are vying for that national respect and a coaching job.
Picked 14th, not nationally but only in the conference, WVU is also off to a 3-1 start and a road win would serve as proof that WVU is for real.
So, everything is ready: can a student teach a lesson to a teacher?
It was 1998, and Brown was already highly respected at his public school, the University of Kentucky. Dykes was just beginning to follow in his father Spike’s footsteps as the head coach at Texas Tech and also worked as a wide receivers coach at UK.
This was a significant place for Brown as he developed his football profile: the Air Raid School, headed by Hal Mumm.
“We had a really good offensive staff there,” Brown said, listing names like Guy Morris, who would become head coach at Kentucky, and Baylor; Tony Franklin, the lead offensive coordinator whom Brown calls “my mentor in the profession”; Chris Hatcher, who won a national championship at Valdosta State; and the godfather of air raids, Mike Leach.
The relationship began there in Lexington, Kentucky between Dykes and Brown.
“Sonny’s dad was the head coach at Texas Tech, but he was so humble that you would never know he was a Power 5 coach,” Brown recalls. “He played baseball, which was a lot of fun, and we played on a JV team in Great Britain that he was the head coach of. We loved it when I was a freshman.”
The two men, of course, went on their journey. Brown transferred to UMass and then began coaching while Dykes traveled the winding road we’ll talk about here shortly.
“We kept in touch and I was really happy for him,” Brown said.
Dykes started out as a high school baseball coach in Texas but soon transitioned to football. He worked his way up from the bottom up, coaching running backs, wide receivers and defensive backs for several years at Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas.
He went to Kentucky as an assistant in 1997, left for a year to become the full-time coach at Northeast Louisiana, then returned to Kentucky in 1999 to become the school’s wide receivers coach and special teams coordinator.
In 2000, he returned home to Lubbock. His father retired to become a wide receivers coach and later added offensive coordinator duties.
He left after six years to become the offensive coordinator at Arizona for three years, then spent three years as head coach at Louisiana Tech before moving on to coach at Cal in the Pac-12.
“He did a great job at Louisiana Tech,” Brown said.
However, the situation at the University of California was difficult.
“He worked really hard at Cal and probably didn’t get enough time,” Brown said.
At Cal, he went 1–11 in his first season before finding success, staying there for four years and finishing with a 19–30 record and a slim bowl bid.
SMU was at the bottom of the football food chain at the time, and he was hired to try to fix that.
“He went to SMU and changed everything. He took it to the next level and then went to the national championship game at TCU last year,” Brown said. “There was no one who was more excited about it than I was.”
Dykes came to TCU from across town at SMU in a tough spot, following Hall of Fame coach Gary Patterson, TCU’s all-time leading scorer.
Interestingly, in light of Deion Sanders’ Colorado debut this year, Dykes beat Colorado 38-13 in his debut with the Horned Frogs.
He carried things to a stunning 12-0 regular season, something Sanders can’t do now that he’s coming off a bitter overtime loss to Kansas State in last year’s Big 12 title game.
Although it dashed dreams of a perfect season, his team built enough capital to enter the College Football Playoff and then pulled off a thrilling surprise with a 51–45 victory over Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl.
This led the Horned Frogs to the national championship game against Georgia, but resulted in a stunning 65-7 loss for Dykes.
However, being so close, they went on a mission this year. They lost the opener (go figure) to Sanders and Colorado 45-42, but have since won three in a row.
When WVU visits on Saturday, it will mark the team’s straight game at Texas, and Dykes knows they are expected to finish fifth overall after narrowly avoiding Morgantown with a 41-31 win last year.
“We know we have big challenges ahead of us on Saturday. I think if you look at the history between TCU and West Virginia, I think we lost four games in a row to them. We had a really tough game last year in Morgantown and we were lucky to get the win. We know this has been a tough game for TCU in the past.”