DENTON – His predecessor’s office was a well-stock homage to the impressive lineage of quarterbacks he’d once coached. It was a more lived-in room, no doubt, but three full years and some never-before-seen program success allow time for interior design.
Neal Brown’s quarters – the same ones that Eric Morris occupied in the North Texas athletic center before he skirted across the border for Oklahoma State two months ago – remains in the predecoration process.
Don’t mind that.
He’s been busy.
“What I’ve told people, if you play NCAA football, you can get into what’s called dynasty mode,” Brown told The Dallas Morning News last month. “That’s basically what we did in a two-week period in January. We built a staff, and we built a team. We’re in dynasty mode.”
In dynasty mode, a popular EA Sports College Football 26 feature that allows players to take over and build their own programs, head coaches are broken into either recruiter, motivator or tactician archetypes.
Brown, a former head coach at West Virginia and Troy, was hired on Dec. 2 to continue the Mean Green’s upward trend after the program fell short of a College Football Playoff berth last season. He’ll need to recruit, motivate and scheme a roster that been almost entirely turned over by a transfer portal period that took the program’s highest-profile players and offered it a half-a-hundred new faces. He completed his first signing day with the program Wednesday and will now direct his attention to next season with 56 total newcomers on the roster.
The time that Brown spent away from football, the evolution of his family and the lessons he learned from his previous stops have helped shape his philosophy and prepared him for this next venture.
“I’m rested, I’m restored and I’ve had an opportunity to reflect,” Brown said. “I have a better understanding of what it takes.”
The dismount
Brown and his family were in the midst of a transitional phase.
He’d been a head coach for nearly a decade and, before that, an assistant or coordinator at six programs since his own collegiate career ended. The six years that he and his family spent in Morgantown, W.Va., was the longest period of time that they’d lived in any one singular location before the often-harsh reality of the profession caught up.
“I call it our ‘dismount’ there,” his wife Brooke Brown said. “I just like the way that sounds better than…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
The Mountaineers fired Brown on Dec. 1, 2024, after he accumulated a 37-35 record and two bowl wins in six seasons. Brown lost two of his last three games – including a blowout at Texas Tech in his final game as coach – to conclude a third season at or under .500 in a four-year stretch before he was let go.
Brown didn’t intend to miss a beat and initially pursued other opportunities after his West Virginia exit. Brooke, who first met her husband in high school at Boyle County High in Danville, Ky., admitted that the two couldn’t envision what their lives might look like without the incessant demands of college football.
The family was at a Pittsburgh Steelers game on Christmas Day, some three-plus weeks into unemployment, when they ran into Patrick Johnston, Brown’s longtime confidante. Johnston, now the Mean Green’s chief of staff, worked in administrative and analyst roles under Brown at Troy and West Virginia and was also without a job.
“We were talking about the jobs that were close, or he almost took, but he didn’t,” Johnston said. “We’re talking about one in particular, and I go, ‘Brooke, that would have been great, but personally for him, I wanted him not to get it so he could have this time.’ I knew that’s where I wanted to be and I encouraged him to do the same.”
Johnston, with a laugh, said he “will not reveal what she said” in response to the recommendation.
He wasn’t the only figure in Brown’s life that offered similar advice. Jason Cummins – a former U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilot-turned-consultant – met Brown more than a decade ago when Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart enlisted him to help guide the department’s coaches and coaches in areas of leadership and performance. Brown bought into the structure immediately and built a strong personal and professional relationship with Cummins in the years since.
Cummins believes that the four key pillars of development are built on the passage of time, the transformation of the individual, the growth through experiences and the examination period that follows. The tricky part for coaches, Cummins said, is the creation of space for self reflection in a nonstop job.
“Brother,” Cummins said after Brown was fired. “Take time to reflect. What did you learn in that experience? What were the things that if you had to do over again, you might do a little differently?”
So Brown, for the first time since his children were born, proceeded into a new college football calendar without a job or the immediate prospects of one on the horizon.
“Looking back,” Brooke said, “I’m so thankful that we didn’t take a job.”
The sabbatical
Brown, in what his wife calls a “sabbatical” that lasted months, used his newfound free time to take stock and evaluate a decade’s worth of experience as a head coach.
He identified what went right. He identified what went wrong. He was able to “reset” in what amounted to the first period of his adult life that wasn’t jammed with meetings, practices, recruitment or donor meetings. He outlined what the structure of a successful program should look like, evaluated the caliber of coaches he’d hire if he were hired to lead another team and established how the administration of a team in the name, image and likeness era should function.
He, above all else, was a “full-time dad” to his three kids Adalyn, now 17, Anslee, now 14, and Dax, a 10-year-old boy who’d only ever known his father as a head coach after what Brooke described as a “really hard few years” that culminated in the end of their West Virginia tenure. That came on the heels of six moves in their eldest daughter’s life alone, jobs at four schools in a nine-year span and the adaptation to a college football atmosphere that’s become more complicated and chaotic than it already was in the transfer portal era.
“Let’s take a breath,” Brooke said. “I realized my kids needed that, too. They needed to get out of the fish bowl. I didn’t even realize it until it was kind of stripped away, like, oh yeah, OK, we all needed just a breath.”
Neal and Brook Brown were able to shield them from college football’s sometimes cruel nature at Troy, or in the early days at West Virginia, but it became nearly impossible to do so when the teenaged girls joined social media and when their young son’s television interests shifted from cartoons to SportsCenter.
They began to understand the magnitude of their father’s job as one of the most prominent figures in the state that they lived in. One time, when Dax was 5, he asked what it meant for a coach to be fired because he saw an unrelated television report about a change elsewhere. It was a “gut punch” to Brooke, who then realized the realities of her husband’s job were inescapable.
“They read it all and they hear it all,” Brooke said. “Their friends also see it all, hear it all, see it all. Their friends also repeat what’s discussed at their kitchen table and that comes to school.”
The children understand, as Brooke said, that if their father lost his job, “that means all your friends’ dads lost their job, too.” Brooke remembers a time when Anslee prayed every night that every member of the recently fired West Virginia staff would find jobs elsewhere after her father’s dismissal.
“You’re trying to balance both of those headspaces of what’s really important in life – your faith, your family and your friends – and that it’s just a game,” Brooke said. “But, if you have a bunch of 19-to-21 year olds that underperform, we don’t get to stay here.”
The family ultimately didn’t stay in Morgantown, and four months after the West Virginia exit, moved into an Austin rental as Brown joined head coach Steve Sarkisian’s staff at Texas as a special assistant. It afforded Brown an opportunity to learn under under a coach who he believes is “as good or better than anybody” in modern college football. It helped him “age backwards in six months” as his wife described. It allowed him to return to the basics of his profession as a coach.
It confirmed, to Brown, that he was ready to return.
“I’ve been able to plan for this,” Brown said. “I had a really strong feeling I would land in this league. I’ve had an opportunity, for upwards of a year, to plan for what an American Conference team looks like and what it takes to be successful.”
The philosophy
After his son was born, when Brown coached at Troy, a sign hung in his office that read “coach the team.”
“That was a reminder to him,” Johnston said. “Coach the team.”
Or, as Brown put it, it was a reminder to ditch micromanagement and “focus my time and energy on the things I’m good at” like the in-program relationships that can build a strong culture, offensive game plans and the processes which his team should follow. Brown, as a young head coach, involved himself in every aspect of his team’s program. He credits the growth of his family as the driver that’s allowed him to relinquish responsibilities to “experts” in their respective fields.
“You can’t be everything all at once,” Johnston said. “Something was going to be pulled away. He didn’t want to have that void at home.”
He didn’t want it to become a detriment to his team, either, especially one in the midst of what he’s described as a “reload.” The Mean Green signed 49 players in the transfer portal. Only Oklahoma State (which took more than a dozen North Texas transfers, including quarterback Drew Mestemaker and running back Caleb Hawkins, after Morris was hired), Memphis (which lost its head coach to Arkansas) and UConn (which lost its head coach to Colorado State) have signed more this cycle.
That doesn’t include the seven high schoolers that North Texas signed Wednesday. It doesn’t include the half-a-hundred returnees, either, that Brown must now familiarize himself with and mesh with one of the nation’s largest crop of newcomers. It doesn’t take into account that the Mean Green, who climbed to No. 24 in the College Football Playoff poll last fall and were one win away from the 12-team postseason, have expectations to contend with in the conference and nationally.
What makes Brown equipped for that challenge?
“He is a grinder,” North Texas running backs coach Chad Scott, who played with Brown at Kentucky and has worked with or under him at six programs, said. “He’s going to do whatever it takes. There are instances where, you know, he’s taken over programs that were already successful prior to him being there and he’s able to keep them rolling.”
Scott coached alongside Brown when he orchestrated a Texas Tech offense that averaged nearly 35 points per game in his three seasons as offensive coordinator. He watched from afar when Brown won double-digit games in three consecutive seasons at Troy in his first stint as a head coach. He was an assistant coach at West Virginia three seasons ago when Brown led the Mountaineers to their winningest campaign in eight years. He didn’t hesitate when Brown offered him a role on the Mean Green’s staff.
He believes that Brown is the same “brilliant man” that he was as a player and young coach. Brown counters that he’s a bit wiser now – in part due to the growth of his family, in part due to his success and in part due to his failures – and is now in a position to mesh what he’s learned into one formula.
The biggest philosophical change, those who’ve worked with Brown say, is in how he’s built his staff. Brown once prioritized coaches and coordinators who brought the best résumés with them. He’s now sought assistants who can fit the culture of each individual team. The Mean Green, whose roster is largely comprised of power conference transfers who didn’t produce at their previous school or lower conference players who’re hungry to prove themselves at a larger level, needed coaches who mirrored that path according to Brown.
“We don’t really have silver spoon guys,” Brown said of his staff. “Everybody has been through adversity. They’ve been fired, they’ve coached at lower levels, and that’s what we’ve wanted. I think once you go through some hard things, you’re a better teacher, you’re more appreciative of what you have.”
Brown fits that to a tee.
“He’s already been rejected once,” Johnston said. “You want somebody that’s foaming at the mouth to prove themselves right.”
