A&M recruit brings a Super Bowl pedigree
COLLEGE STATION — Kam Brown of Colleyville had pledged to play for UCLA on the West Coast as Jimbo Fisher tried getting the fleet receiver’s attention from the East Coast.
But not long after Fisher left Florida State for Texas A&M in December 2017, Brown backed off his verbal commitment to the Bruins when Jim Mora Jr. was fired. Fisher and the four-star receiver wound up meeting in the middle — otherwise known as Kyle Field.
That’s good news for the Aggies, considering Brown (6-0, 176) arrived on campus in January with sharpened skills and quite a pedigree: His father, Larry Brown, was a Super Bowl MVP for the Dallas Cowboys.
The last cornerback to earn MVP in the game, he picked off Steelers quarterback Neil O’Donnell twice as the Cowboys beat Pittsburgh 27-17 in Super Bowl XXX on Jan. 28, 1996.
Fisher, then the Auburn quarterbacks coach, watched that game. A little more than two decades later, he watched Brown’s son in action on the other side of the ball.
Kam Brown’s attention to detail in running routes for Colleyville Heritage caught Fisher’s eye, but it didn’t surprise the longtime college football coach and recruiter.
“When you’re around coaches’ sons, or ex-players’ kids, they understand a lot of the nuances of the game, or little technicalities of their position,” Fisher said.
At wide receiver, for example, “they’ve been explained to at a younger age of not just running a route, but knowing how to run a specific route, how to change it, how to adapt it, how to change speeds, how to do different things,” Fisher said, adding, “That doesn’t mean you’re going to be a great player.”
In other words, it still takes a certain amount of athleticism and desire to soak in and apply the wisdom of a football elder, which the younger Brown appears to have done — right down to being one of eight early enrollees in a class of 25 signees.
“He wanted to get down there, take classes and start the process,” Larry Brown told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in December. “He wanted to learn from (the transition). He did everything he could the last four years to get there early, and we’re happy for him.”
Kam Brown had 147 catches, 2,438 receiving yards and 39 touchdown receptions in high school, and now will try and make an early impression for the Aggies. He can point to the example of his resilient father, who didn’t get any scholarship offers out of Los Angeles High in California.
So Larry Brown enrolled at Southwest Community College in Los Angeles, finally getting TCU’s attention after two seasons of junior college ball. He turned in a solid senior season for the Horned Frogs in 1990, but was still only a 12th round selection of the Cowboys in 1991 — the 320th pick of 334 players drafted.
Five years later, he was a Super Bowl MVP and a three-time Super Bowl champion. Three cornerbacks were picked in the first round that year, but one of the three picked in the last round wound up the best player in the nation’s most ballyhooed game.
The draft dropped to eight rounds in 1993 and to the current seven rounds in 1994, meaning if Larry Brown had come along two years later he wouldn’t have been drafted at all.
That’s why coaches should account for the immeasurables when tallying the measurables, Fisher said when discussing Kam Brown’s refined skills and football IQ. Fisher, who won a national title at Florida State in 2013, said numbers gleaned at the NFL combine that begins Tuesday in Indianapolis should only tell part of a player’s story.
“There’s a lot of this game that the world gets caught up in, as I say, a ‘combine world,’ ” Fisher said. “It’s not. All you have to do is look at the New England Patriots. How many first-round picks do they have — there’s a few — but there are a lot of guys who (aren’t). Julian Edelman, I use him has a great example. Here’s a seventh-round pick who was a quarterback in college.
“It’s the nuances and intelligence of the game, the little things that really make a difference.”