Quickly get to know Jason Brown, the new ‘Last Chance U’ coach and main character

Netflix’s Last Chance U moves to Independence Community College in Kansas for its third season, out July 20. The Pirates are a different program than the East Mississippi Community College we met in Seasons 1 and 2. EMCC is a juggernaut, while the Pirates have spent most of their history as bottom-feeders.

The move to a new campus means the introduction of a new head coach and de-facto main character. That’s Jason Brown, Independence’s head man since the 2016 season.

He’s a former JUCO All-American quarterback out of Compton Community College in California. He later played at Fort Hays State, a Division II school, and set a bunch of program records there before bouncing around the NFL, NFL Europe, and the Arena League. He became the head coach at Compton in 2007, moved to the same job at a California high school in 2014, and took a job as Garden City (Kan.) CC’s offensive coordinator in 2015.

Stephens is famously rough around the edges. Brown describes the program he runs at ICC as “militant almost” in this interview with SB Nation’s Bill Connelly. He calls JUCO “football jail” and, in the show, tells his players at one point: “I don’t care if you hate me now. Love me at the end, when you get a scholarship.” So, yeah, he seems pretty Stephens-like.

Brown jokes (?) at one point during Season 3, when extreme weather’s approaching: “Hey when it gets cold like that, you know? Probably a tornado. But I’m not taking these dudes off the field.”

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Brown’s done quite a job at ICC so far. The Pirates went 2-8 in 2015, the last season before his hiring. They’d been a non-factor in the Jayhawk Conference. They bounced to 5-4 in his second year, when they finished the season on a four-game winning streak.

Things really took off in 2017, the season Netflix’s cameras followed the team around. The Pirates went 9-2 (6-1 in the Jayhawk), and they were dominant almost the whole season after losing by 49 points to Iowa Western in their first game. Brown thinks the presence of the camera crews threw off his team during that blowout loss.

“You know, we got our butts kicked game one because of the cameras,” he told SB Nation. “That’s truly my gut instinct. Doesn’t matter who we played — we played a great team — but I think we coulda played a high school team and woulda got beat the same way. We just thought that that was supposed to be our night, and everybody was gonna stop what they were doing and bow down to the Indy Pirates. We played a team that just took it to us and outclassed us, as I told their head coach after the game. I didn’t even get pissed off about it like I usually do. It was just so unbecoming, and it wasn’t our team.”

ICC got its act together after that. The Pirates won their next seven games before a loss to Butler (Kan.) Community College, and they finished by beating Northeastern Oklahoma A&M in the Midwest Bowl Classic.

It has a lot to do with how JUCO recruiting works. These aren’t NCAA rosters, where players enter a program and stay there for three to five years. JUCOs are two-year schools, and a lot of players only spend one football season before dropping out or transferring up.

Brown’s figured out how to use JUCO’s rapid roster turnover to his advantage. As he told Connelly:

Football recruiting in junior college never ends. That’s our blood-life. When a tackle gets kicked out of Florida State on July 30, we need to go pick him up. We have to show we are the go-getters that have their ear to the ground and turn over rocks.

You always want to bring in the best players, and you want to bring ‘em in 30 deep, if you can. I believe competition breeds winning cultures.

It eliminates a lot of kids doing foolish things, too, because now you can cut Player A, and Player B’s just as good. That’s why we bring in so many numbers, and that’s why we recruit the nation.

We recruit until Day 1 of the season. And we recruit all season long for the next year’s class.

It’s an 18-month school. We don’t have an alma mater, don’t have a fight song. This is not a four-year institution. I don’t get to build these kids for a year, so we don’t teach a lot of Xs and Os. We had 27 Division I transfers last year — 15 Power 5 transfers. I’m not teaching them nothin’, and neither are my 22-year-old coaches.

Brown might yet lead Indy to JUCO glory.

But he’s already led it to a good enough season to make for an attention-grabbing season of Netflix.