Cal State Fullerton Notebook / Robyn Norwood : Jerry Brown Learns Quickly as Assistant With Vikings

After 8 seasons as an assistant to Gene Murphy, Jerry Brown traded football Saturdays for football Sundays last year.

After a wait that might have been longer than it should have, he got his chance in the pros, landing a job as an assistant with the Minnesota Vikings.

It was a hiring hailed as encouraging because Brown is black. But more telling was a comment from the Vikings, who said they were so impressed with Brown that color wasn’t an issue: They would have hired him if he were green.

Brown was in Fullerton last week, “back to thaw out a bit,” he said.

He was back to see his old buddies at the Titan football house, who were eager to razz him about being a big-time coach in the National Football League.

“They give me a hard time,” Brown said, laughing.

Brown said his first season in the NFL was difficult, particularly at the start.

On the first day of practice with Viking veterans, Brown told them they knew the playbook better than he did. “I may need your help,” he told them. “But it won’t remain that way.”

“It was very tough at first,” Brown said. “I had to learn a new system. It’s almost like going to another country knowing nothing of the language, then learning it and trying to teach it at the same time.”

Plus, there was the change from coaching college athletes to coaching professional athletes--Viking receivers such as Anthony Carter, Hassan Jones and Leo Lewis.

“At first I thought in my mind that (the players) would be very different, that these guys would have gigantic egos and say, ‘Here comes the college coach,’ ” Brown said.

But he adjusted soon enough.

“As the year was going on, I always found myself comparing pro ball to college ball. Do you give these guys a pep talk like you do college players? Do you pat them on the butt? Do you pull out little articles?

“Early on, I wouldn’t do those things. But I think pro players need to be motivated too.”

It was a season that Brown enjoyed--”I love the games, I love them,” he said--but it was one that ended disappointingly for the Vikings.

“Early on, the Vikings’ people were talking Super-Bowl type team,” Brown said. “I didn’t have anything to compare it to then. But as the year went on, I started to see that this was a team capable of being in the Super Bowl. . . . Hopefully, we will be next year.”

The Vikings’ chances began to fall apart. There were two losses to the Green Bay Packers, and a regular-season loss to the San Francisco 49ers that Brown called “a golden opportunity.”

And there was the final playoff game against the 49ers.

“That second 49er game was like running into a wall because all of sudden, it’s done,” he said. “You never think you’re going to be done until you get to the Super Bowl, and then suddenly it’s over, and you don’t have to worry about practicing or preparing for a game or anything the next day.”

Brown had been at Fullerton since Murphy came to the school in 1980, and during that time had risen from receivers coach to offensive coordinator to associate head coach.

His ties with Fullerton remain.

After the college season ended, Brown sent Murphy a plane ticket and a game ticket for the Monday game against the Chicago Bears.

“I didn’t give him a choice,” Brown said. “It was one of my ways of repaying him for having so much faith in me there at Fullerton. Murphy is one of my best friends.”

That relationship might soon expand. Brown has a nephew, Michael, who is a talented defensive back coming out of Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio. He is considering Fullerton.

Brown said he thinks he will continue to coach in the pros, rather than return to college coaching.

The hours were longer at Fullerton, Brown remembered, but they were enjoyable.

“(At Fullerton), everybody knows what they’ve got to do, but it never seems like work,” Brown said. “Whereas here, it’s kind of like you’re in the business world. The thing that’s most important is that you win. If you don’t win, you don’t have a job, and they make no bones about it.”

The men’s basketball team has been sporting a new look lately--a matchup zone defense, and most recently, a fullcourt zone press and up-tempo game.

So, too, has Coach John Sneed, who for 2 games wore a hair style that was alternately called the Pat Riley-look and the Eddie Munster-look.

The team’s new look apparently is the more permanent of the two.

“I came up with a new look,” Sneed said. “I scrapped the hairdo.”

That effectively put an end to a deal struck between Sneed and forward Derek Jones. If Sneed could look like Riley, the bargain went, Jones was to play like James Worthy.

When Kohn Smith, Utah State’s first-year head coach, implied that his team’s loss against Fullerton might have been caused by a letdown because of playing in Titan Gym 2 nights after playing in Nevada Las Vegas’ Thomas & Mack Center, he didn’t endear himself to Sneed.

“To me that was so bush,” Sneed said. “If you get your butt beat, you get your butt beat. That’s all there is to it. We have problems when we play at Utah State, not because of the arena but because of the environment and the altitude. But if we get beat, we don’t say it was because of the altitude.”