Nathan Brown, head coach of the University of Central Arkansas football team, talked to the Little Rock Touchdown Club for the sixth year in a row Monday morning, discussing topics like NIL and his team’s miraculous comeback in a recent game against the Southeast Missouri State Redhawks.
In a season where all other D1 football teams in Arkansas have been struggling, UCA has so far played a winning season, going 3-0 in conference play and 5-2 overall. The Bears’ greatest highlight this season has no doubt been their victory over the SEMO Redhawks on Oct. 7, where the team faced a 30-6 score in favor of the Redhawks at the end of the third quarter. In the last quarter, the Bears scored six touchdowns, bringing the final tally to 33-38 in favor of UCA.
As a record-setting quarterback at UCA himself during his college career, Brown has been a part of no less than 218 UCA football games since 2004, either as a player, coach or assistant coach. In all those years, he said, there were good times, bad times and frustrating times, but he wouldn’t take a single one of those 218 games back.
“One of my favorite quotes is ‘pressure is a privilege,’” Brown said. “That means things are expected of you. One thing that people don’t see [is that] the pressure of being a coach is every single day. You see what happens on Saturday, you see the touchdowns, you see the interceptions, you see the wins, you see the losses, you see what you would have done better. But let me tell you what every day entails.
“It entails being a counselor. It entails being a tutor. It entails me being a father figure or dad for some of these young men. It entails being a disciplinarian, it entails having a shoulder to cry on for somebody. I’ve had two or three different athletes this year that have lost a loved one, and two of them have had to miss a game because of a funeral. You don’t see that. You don’t see the day-to-day pressure.”
He also spoke about what he called a loss of innocence in sports due to NIL rules. Though Brown expressed his support for NIL and for college players being able to earn money, he described the drastic changes these rules have caused.
“The childlike innocence has been taken away from 18-22 year olds,” Brown said. “Rex [Nelson], I assume you’d run through a wall for Ouachita Baptists, right? David Bazzel, I know you’d run through a wall for the University of Arkansas. Things have changed. They’re not the same. You look at these young student-athletes, they’ve got the ability to bounce when they want to bounce; they have the ability to make money, which is awesome.
“I’m a big advocate and promoter of NIL, but it’s taken away the pride, it’s taken away the want and the will to do whatever it takes for my team. Well, I think that at the University of Central Arkansas, we have developed a culture that still has pride. I believe that we’ve developed a culture that still wants to run through a wall for each other.”
Brown cited the game against SEMO as proof of that pride. He admitted that he himself would have left the game at the end of the third quarter had he been a spectator, and the team could have easily thrown in the towel. A less dedicated team could not have made that comeback happen. The strength of UCA’s football program, Brown said, is not due to him nor due to the team’s current roster, but is a result of years and years of culture and history that have given the program its backbone.
“[Over] the last five years, going into year six, the things that have changed as a head coach are immense,” Brown said. “You talk about NIL, you talk about the transfer portal, you talk about going through the COVID situation in 2020, and that obviously lingered. It’s not what it looked like a decade ago. And so you adapt and you adjust. That’s how you have success.”
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