11 minute read
A Football Life
KEN BROWNING HAS IMPACTED THE CAREERS AND LIVES OF HUNDREDS OF TAR HEELS
KBY LEE PACE PHOTOS BY UNC ATHLETIC COMMUNICATIONS
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Ken Browning grew up on a farm in northern Durham County and at one point thought of becoming a veterinarian. But that changed his senior year at Northern Durham High in 1963 when, as an all-conference two-way lineman, he broke his leg early in the season and would be out for about five weeks. Head coach Ernie Martin suggested that Browning, already established as a player whom others would ask for assignment cues and reminders, make productive use of the down-time and help coach the freshman team. “Coaching made sense to me,” Browning says. “I knew everybody’s assignments pretty much. Even the guys I played with, if they didn’t know what to do, they’d ask me. The coaching just felt right. That experience gave me a tip, ‘You might can do this, this might be what you’re cut out to do.’ That put the bug in my ear.” Call it a gift. Everybody has one in some form or fashion. Browning’s special talent for half a century now has been to impart the skills and schemes of football to young men. It’s been to motivate
them and provide structure, counsel and discipline. And he’s done so with a forceful yet calm and even-handed approach.
“I’ve yet to hear him raise his voice,” says John Dunn, a tight end in the early 2000s who’s now offensive coordinator at the University of Connecticut. “Coach Browning didn’t have to scream and yell to motivate people because you respected him so much you didn’t want to let him down.”
“He was not a yeller, never dog-cussed anyone,” adds Ryan Sims, a first-round draft pick in 2001 after his career as a defensive tackle at Carolina. “He was cool and calm as could be. But you knew when you disappointed him and he was not happy.”
Browning coached 18 years at Carolina under four head coaches. He coached the defensive line under Mack Brown and then Carl Torbush from 1994-2000, adding the defensive coordinator role in 2000. John Bunting retained him in 2001 but asked Browning to move to tight ends, which he did through 2004. Then Bunting had an opening on the defensive line in 2005, and Browning moved back to coach tackles for Bunting’s last two years. When Butch Davis arrived in 2007, he retained Browning but switched him to running backs.
That 1994-2011 tenure is the longest for any Tar Heel football coach. George Barclay had 16 years coaching at Carolina, 13 as a freshman team or varsity assistant and three as head coach from 1953-55.
And now that tenure is adding a new chapter. When Mack Brown was hired in November 2018, for help with film study, recruiting evaluations and opponent and self-scouting to supplement the work of the full-time assistants, he wanted to hire several veteran coaches he’d worked with before who’d “seen it all.” Two were Darrell Moody (an assistant during Brown’s first run at Carolina) and Sparky Woods (the former head coach at Appalachian State, South Carolina and VMI), who joined the staff as “senior consultants.”
Brown also approached Browning, who he first hired from Northern Durham High after the 1993 season. Browning said he still loved coaching and the game of football and wanted to help, but laws governing his State of North Carolina retirement prevented him from taking a full-time position. Nonetheless, Browning has enjoyed assisting Brown and the defensive staff on a part-time basis.
“I told Coach Brown I had other things I was doing, but I certainly wanted to help to get this program back to where I think it ought to be, not only in this state, but on a national scope,” Browning says, “I think this program can be a contender on a national scale. The potential is there.”
Browning graduated from Northern Durham in 1964 and played at Guilford College, earning a degree in 1968. He coached high school football one year in Roanoke and one in Martinsville before being hired as head coach at Ledford High near High Point in 1970. Having to become a jack-of-all-trades in those early days stood Browning well over the years. “I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a break for me that first year when I was assigned to be a jayvee coach along with being a varsity assistant,” Browning says. “Then the next year, I was the only coach on defense full-time on that side of the ball. And my first year at Ledford, they had won two games in four years and every coach was gone. I was the only coach that first year. “As a result, I wound up having to coach a lot of positions I had not played or coached. It helped broaden my knowledge base of the whole game. I “ “I TOLD COACH BROWN I HAD OTHER THINGS I WAS DOING, think sometimes guys can specialize so much early in their career, they kind of get pigeon-holed. Sometimes when you’re on your own like I was, you have to dig in and figure it out one way or the other.”
BUT I CERTAINLY WANTED TO Browning says his mother was a teacher
HELP TO GET THIS PROGRAM and his father a good teacher with his children on the farm.
BACK TO WHERE I THINK IT “Coaching seemed to come easy to me,”
OUGHT TO BE, NOT ONLY IN he says. “My parents were important, and I was blessed to have good high school THIS STATE, BUT ON A NATIONAL coaches. Then in college, I had a couple SCOPE. I THINK THIS PROGRAM where I thought, ‘Well, this is not how I want to do this. You have to learn how not
CAN BE A CONTENDER ON A to do some things, and that’s as important NATIONAL SCALE. sometimes as how-to.” Browning became a close lifelong friend
THE POTENTIAL IS THERE.” with fellow Guilford College player Allen Brown in the 1960s. Brown went on to a legendary career at Thomasville High— winning four state titles over 33 years—and through the 1970s and ‘80s Browning and Brown traveled to countless clinics, college spring practices and even NFL training camps. Browning remembers trips to the Washington Redskins training camp in Carlisle, Pa., under head coach Joe Gibbs as being watershed events in the evolution of both coaches. “We would ride up there and spend a week,” he says. “You could stay in a dorm and watch that old 16 millimeter film all night if you wanted. Neither of us was a guy who said, ‘This is the NFL, we can’t do this in high school.’ Our attitude was to learn every element, for example, of the counter-trey the Redskins were using and do it at our level every bit as good. And we did. The counter-trey we ran at Northern was exactly the same play the Redskins ran.” Browning was also struck watching the coaching style and demeanor of Gibbs, the Redskins’ head coach who won three Super Bowls from 1981-92.
“He never raised his voice,” Browning says. “You could be there a week and not hear it. But the players knew what he expected. The standards had been set.”
At some point, both Browning and Brown had an important revelation:
“For learning to take place, it must be important for the student and the teacher,” Browning says. “We have both used that. A lot of people miss that point. It has to be important to both parties.”
Browning was head coach at Northern Durham for 18 years, compiling a 214-56-6 record and winning the 1993 state 4A championship. The Knights were 43-2 his last three years. Mack Brown actually approached him about the Tar Heels’ offensive line job after the 1989 season as a backup in the event that Brown’s first choice for the job, Whitey Jordan, didn’t take the job. But Jordan did come to Carolina and coached three years, and Brown went back to Browning in 1993 after defensive tackles coach Dan Brooks left for Tennessee.
Query Browning’s players and colleagues over his time at Carolina and they agree he had an innate ability to simplify and be patient with players until the light bulb popped on.
“He had a way of breaking things down to the smallest element and making it easy for anyone to digest,” Sims says. “He could coach any position, coach anybody. That has been his gift.”
Dunn played quarterback at West Henderson High and arrived at Carolina in 2001 with the idea of walking on. They put him at tight end, where Browning was coaching. He lettered in 2003 and then an injury forced him out of the game. He became a graduate assistant, and over 15 years
his coaching career has taken him to LSU and Maryland in college ball, the Bears and Jets of the NFL, and to the Huskies’ staff in 2018 as offensive coordinator and associate head coach.
“I came in wide-eyed and having no idea what college football was all about,” Dunn says. “You see all these personalities of the coaches, and honestly, the first thing that stuck out to me with Coach Browning was, ‘Man, this guy is different.’ He genuinely cares about people and is a teacher in every sense of the word.
“There’s an old saying in coaching, ‘They don’t care what you know unless they know you care.’ That’s his deal. That’s something I have taken and tried to remember every stop I’ve made.”
John Shoop was quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator under Butch Davis from 2007-10. He’d coached more than a decade in the NFL but soon became convinced that “Ken Browning has forgotten more football that
I’d ever know.” Shoop, now living in Asheville with his family and no longer a full-time coach, remembers Browning’s attention to the details like proper footwork and his skill in adjusting to different running “ “YOU SEE ALL THESE PERSONALITIES OF THE COACHES, AND HONESTLY, and striding styles among tailbacks like Johnny White and Shaun Draughn. “Johnny was a short-strider, and his timing and tempo were different from Shaun, who was a long strider,” Shoop THE FIRST THING THAT STUCK OUT TO says. “If you don’t recognize those
ME WITH COACH BROWNING WAS, differences and account for them, the timing of the back hitting the hole can
‘MAN, THIS GUY IS DIFFERENT.’ HE be completely different from one guy to GENUINELY CARES ABOUT PEOPLE AND the next. Ken individualized his coaching so that each guy really hit the hole at the IS A TEACHER IN EVERY same time. That’s something that never SENSE OF THE WORD.” had crossed my mind. “The nuance he brought to the game was remarkable. That comes from years and years of wisdom.” Bobby Rome played running back from 2006-09 and Browning was his position coach the last three of those years. He remembers
his senior season when he was dogged by a severe bout with the flu, lost 30 pounds and missed a month of the season. Browning suggested he stay engaged by helping break down film and coach the younger running backs.
“He told me I might not be much value physically until I got my weight back, but I still had a lot to offer,” says Rome, today the head coach at Virginia University at Lynchburg. “He picked my spirits up. I studied protections and different techniques for the various running plays. I saw how a game plan was put together. That expanded my mind as a football player. That’s what got me into coaching.”
Rome is told that Browning was doing for him exactly what Ernie Martin had done for Browning four decades before.
A pause on the other end.
“Man …”
Another pause.
“I’ll tell you this. He reached out to me when I got this job,” Rome says of taking the Dragons’ job in 2018 after the team was winless in 2017 and outscored by more than 300 points. “He asked me how I would approach the situation. He said, ‘Let me give you a bit of advice. Go in there with love. That’s a tough situation. I’m telling you, you’ll be surprised how hard those kids will play for you. The kids there, they’ve been through so much, go in there with love, that’s what they need.’”
Something clicked in Lynchburg, where Rome has on his staff former Tar Heels Kentwan Palmer and Erik Highsmith, as the team won four games in 2018.
“Not everyone has had a Coach Browning in their lives,” he says. “Those of us who have are fortunate.”
Or, as John Dunn says, “I would bet a hundred people call him on Father’s Day. He’s been that important in a whole bunch of lives.”
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