Former DB Selwyn Brown prepared sons to be Canes
Damari Brown and Davonte Brown were born to be Miami Hurricanes.
“They couldn’t help it,” Selwyn Brown said with a laugh, a few days after his sons committed to play for his alma mater.
He was a star at Miami in the 1980s, a freshman for the Hurricanes’ first national championship in 1983 and a senior for their second in 1987, and he raised them in a Miamicrazed household and coached them in the image of those title-winning teams.
Every Saturday, he would get home from coaching one of them in Pop Warner Little Scholars — at various points, he coached both with the Plantation Wildcats — and then scream at his television for a few hours, no matter whether the Hurricanes were winning or losing.
All throughout the week, he’d coach them up using those same lessons passed down by Howard Schnellenberger and Jimmy Johnson, both of whom coached him in Coral Gables.
Still, he really didn’t expect this moment to come. Miami didn’t give too much attention to Davonte Brown when he was a three-star cornerback at Plantation American Heritage in the Class of 2020, according to the 247Sports composite rankings, and so he chose the UCF Knights, playing there for two years before deciding to enter the transfer portal.
The Hurricanes did, however, go hard after Damari Brown, only the Alabama Crimson Tide once looked like the safer bet to pluck the four-star cornerback out of American Heritage.
Instead, the older brother announced his plan to transfer to Miami last week, and then the younger brother orally committed and signed a national letter of intent with the
Hurricanes last Wednesday. The three defensive backs all celebrated together onstage inside American Heritage High School’s auditorium after Damari Brown made his announcement on ESPN2.
“It hasn’t sunk all the way in, first of all, because I didn’t think this was going to happen,” the father said, “but things have a funny way of working out for the best.”
In the end, should anyone really have been too surprised? Mario Cristobal comes from the same Miami era as Brown — Luis Cristobal, the coach’s older brother, even played with Brown — and the messages he uses on recruits mirror what Brown told his sons about his playing days in South Florida.
“I used to always tell them, and brag about what we used to do and how we used to do it,” Brown said. “We were the bad boys back then and we worked
Damari Brown hard — we worked extremely hard. We were extremely confident in what we did and how we did it.”
Later, almost unprompted, he added: “If you came to Miami, you had to be a tough son of a gun. It’s everybody. You had to have that demeanor, you had to be tough, hardnosed because, again, that’s what it took to get through those practices . ... You had to stay on your P’s and Q’s, man, because the guy behind you is just as good as you, so you have to dot your I’s and cross your T’s, go out and perform every day. You couldn’t take any days off, you couldn’t take any games off. If so, you’d be on the bench, so everybody had that tenacity, that work ethic and just being accountable. That made us good.”
Sound familiar? If Cristobal is looking for players ready to embrace the attitudes of the goodold days, going and getting a pair of prospects raised in their image isn’t a bad idea.
“That’s all they’ve been preaching,” Damari Brown said last Wednesday. “They’re trying to prove it by getting the recruits in.”
For Davonte Brown, the decision came down to the Hurricanes or Florida State Seminoles, and his father was a little surprised when he picked Miami. Cristobal made a late push there, bringing him in for a visit, and selling him on immediate playing time and the possibility of playing with his brother.
For Damari Brown, the Hurricanes fended off Alabama, although Mike Smith wasn’t surprised by the decision, even though the Crimson Tide at one point were trending, according to 247’s Crystal Ball.
“In our locker room,” the Patriots’ coach said, “he was the first one on, ‘They’re going to turn it around down there,’ and just really took notice of all the things that Mario was doing down there.”
The Browns are one of three sibling duos set to join the Hurricanes next year and both could wind up starting for Miami.
The Hurricanes lost both of their top cornerbacks from last year, leaving a gaping hole at the position. Davonte Brown, who was a starter at UCF, could be the favorite to start at one corner spot, but his younger brother might have an even loftier ceiling.
American Heritage has a storied legacy of sending corners to the NFL, and Smith compares Brown to its most successful alumnus.
“’Mari is the closest that we’ve had to [Denver Broncos cornerback Patrick Surtain II], just kind of their demeanor, how they approach the game,” he said. “They stay very level. They don’t get too high, they don’t get too low. They’ve got that same personality and they’re both big corners. Both of them are strong as hell.”
David Wilson: 305-376-3406, @DBWilson2