Before WSU LB Keith Brown could land in Pullman, he had to learn more about himself

PULLMAN — On Tuesday evening, Keith Brown sat down and fired up Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the newest installment of the first-person shooter video game. From his apartment in Pullman, where he’s earning more playing time by the week in Washington State’s linebacker corps, he hopped in a lobby with some of his former teammates at Oregon.

Before long, as they started playing and chatting, Brown fielded a question from one of them: How are you liking things at WSU? Brown spent two years at Oregon and redshirted last season at Louisville, after all, so his buddies were curious about his opinion on the Cougars’ program.

Brown hardly blinked before he answered.

“I was like, ‘Fellas, this is the most fun and most enjoyment I’ve had since I’ve been in college,’ ” Brown said. “They were like, ‘Bro, what makes it like that?’ I was like, ‘It’s just the team and the atmosphere and the coaches. We’re just not worried about anything besides just us and playing ball and hanging out with each other and stuff like that.’ ”

In small-town Pullman, a far cry from the busier environments of Eugene and Louisville, Brown, a former four-star prospect, is feeling more at home than he has before. After a slow start to his playing time this season, he’s seen more and more snaps in recent games, and he’s making them count for the 7-1 Cougars: He’s played double-digit snaps in his past four games, all wins, making a critical fourth-down tackle for loss against San Diego State, recording a pair of quarterback hurries against Hawaii, helping secure a comeback win over Fresno State with two more in the fourth quarter.

It’s the most action he’s seen in two years, going back to his second and final season at Oregon, a 40-minute drive from his hometown of Lebanon. It took some time for Brown to establish himself among WSU’s linebackers, though. After playing 21 snaps in the Cougars’ season-opening rout over FCS Portland State, he played only 31 snaps in the next four games combined, and he didn’t play at all against San Jose State.

Around the time of that game, on Sept. 20, he met with WSU head coach Jake Dickert in his office. In his own words, Brown felt he was in a sort of “neutral zone” – not thrilled with his lesser role, but not too upset, either. More than anything, he just wanted to win, but he did want to get on the field more, so he figured it was a good time to meet with Dickert.

Dickert started by asking Brown how he was doing. He could tell by the look in Brown’s face recently, Dickert told him, that he could sense from frustration. Competitive frustration is good, Dickert advised, and Brown should feel that way – it’s the sign of a competitor. Brown agreed, acknowledging he had been feeling flustered over his role, and he was open to play defense, special teams, whatever.

Dickert told Brown he wanted him to trust the process, to keep leading like the veteran he is, no matter his role on the team. Stick to that, Dickert said, and he could expect his role to expand through a natural process.

In the weeks that followed, Brown made his head coach look like a genius. To polish off a comeback win over Fresno State on Oct. 12, WSU coaches inserted Brown for a few blitz packages on the game’s final drive. He came up with a pair of pressures that helped the Cougars secure a stop, totaling 19 snaps for the game.

A week later, in Washington State’s lopsided win over Hawaii, Brown played 18 more snaps. He pocketed two more pressures, rushing the passer on a few more of defensive coordinator Jeff Schmedding’s blitzes.

A week after that, Brown played his best game of the season . In 19 snaps against San Diego State, Brown found himself on the field for some of the game’s biggest possessions, including the Aztecs’ fourth-and-2 late in the second quarter. When SDSU handed it off to running back Marquez Cooper, Brown surged around from the right side and met Cooper in the backfield, making one of his four tackles in that game.

Against SDSU, Brown didn’t record any quarterback pressures, but coaches have found he’s particularly effective in that part of the game. Make no mistake about the importance of that development: Brown’s speed and tackling savvy have helped WSU unlock its pass rush, which was all but invisible for the first several games of the season. Without feeling any pressure in the pocket, opposing quarterbacks like San Jose State’s Emmett Brown could sit back and rack up 375 passing yards.

Through five games, the Cougars had totaled just five sacks, which ranked No. 116 nationally. It presented a big enough problem that Dickert brought it up several times in news conferences, pondering how to help his edges and interior linemen get after the quarterback. Brute force? Speed? More blitzes?

Brown has provided solid pass rush by checking all three boxes. He’s a reliable tackler and speedy for his position, which makes it easy for Schmedding to ask him to get to the quarterback in blitz packages. It is hardly a coincidence, though.

At Oregon, Brown was teammates for two seasons with fellow linebacker Noah Sewell, who was drafted by the Chicago Bears in the fifth round last spring. In Eugene, Sewell taught Brown about rushing the passer, showing him the right technique and how to develop sharper instincts. They’ve been friends since they were 15 or 16, back when they attended the same high school camps, so Brown has had plenty of time to internalize the work he did with Sewell.

“I love rushing the passer,” Brown said, “especially from some of the up looks we do, when I’m at the line of scrimmage. I love rushing the passer from the line of scrimmage.”

It’s easy enough to pick up on. What isn’t such common knowledge, though, is how much more content Brown is these days than he was around this time last year.

•••

Brown sauntered into Louisville linebackers coach Mark Ivey’s office with one message: He was ready to take a redshirt year. It was last fall, and after transferring from Oregon to Louisville, he wasn’t enjoying the role he envisioned for himself. He didn’t want to burn a year of eligibility by not playing, and he would rather use the time to get back in shape and figure out his next move.

He saw the writing on the wall. In fall camp, he worked his way from the bottom of the depth chart to rotating with the first- and second-team units. He figured that’s the kind of role he would play when the season began. Then the Cardinals hosted a scrimmage.

“And I was terrible in it. I looked terrible out there,” Brown said. “After the scrimmage, Coach told me they’re gonna make another linebacker the starter, and then it kind of just went from there.”

Even then, Brown was mature and self-aware enough to know he had it coming. He had only arrived on campus on July 4, a few weeks before the start of fall camp. Brown had spent the summer going on visits, eating food on the road, “living the portal life,” in his own words. Come season time, it was clear he wasn’t ready to play.

Brown felt disappointed because he wouldn’t see the field the way he thought he would, but he also worried about the people in his orbit, his family and friends, the ones who had supported him all this time. He could stomach getting a lesser role – he had been around football long enough to know that’s the way it goes sometimes – but Brown had a harder time accepting that his family and friends wouldn’t get to see him play at his new stop.

“You feel like you’re letting people down,” Brown said. “There’s this big change. I’m gonna go here and do this, do this, do that. And then when it doesn’t go your way, you feel like you let people down.”

So why leave for Louisville in the first place?

“I think it was because of the fact that I went there for X amount of money,” Brown said. “So I assumed that, because I was getting X amount of money, that I was guaranteed the starting spot. They were never ready to give me that starting spot.

“My head was just too big. I was like, ‘I don’t need to practice hard. I don’t need to eat right.’ I could just kind of coast into this position. And that’s just not the case.”

The Cardinals offered him a sizable NIL deal, so as he mulled his options out of the portal, he landed at Louisville – 2,000 miles away from home, a part of the country he wasn’t familiar with.

“When you’re 15, 16, coming out of high school, you wanna just go to the flashiest, coolest place possible,” Brown said. “With the new NIL world, when you transfer, that’s kind of a big point of transferring – where can I get the most money?”

“You throw a bunch of money at a kid – or a dream of money – and they kind of get wrapped up in this idea that a certain amount of money is a big amount of money,” Brown’s mother, Sarah Brown, said. “I think he kind of just kind of chased a pipe dream, maybe a little bit.”

That time, though, was crucial for Brown. After he informed coaches of his plan to redshirt, he felt the stress lift off his shoulders. He wasn’t traveling with the team, wasn’t worrying about his place on the depth chart, and he was getting the season back anyway. He maintained a strong work ethic and committed himself to being a valuable teammate, but instead of dwelling on whether he would play well on Saturdays, he could plot his next move.

For Brown, part of that process involved reflecting. He had landed a nice payday at Louisville, but he wasn’t playing nearly as much as he wanted. What did that mean for his future?

“I was thinking, like, ‘Why did I come to college in the first place?’ ” Brown said. “When I first came to college, there was no NIL. So I was like, ‘Why do I play football?’ It’s not to get paid – I mean, one day I would love to get paid for it. But I was like, ‘Why did I start playing football, and why did I come to college in the first place?’ And it was just to get a degree and play football.”

Last December, Brown realized he could do so sooner than he expected. Around that time, a West Virginia judge ruled that multitime undergraduate transfers can play immediately at their new schools. Brown wasn’t set to graduate until the spring, so instead of sticking around at Louisville for another semester, he could find a new home right away.

It was music to the ears of Sarah Brown, who had made a plan with her son: Brown would travel with the Cardinals to San Diego, where they played in the Holiday Bowl, then evaluate their options from there. Roughly a day after the bowl game, the judge made his ruling, and the two suddenly had a bevy of options at their disposal.

When Brown hit the portal, he got in touch with Dickert. The two already had a relationship. In 2019-20 , when Dickert was WSU’s defensive coordinator and Brown was a high school star in Lebanon, Dickert recruited him to come play in Pullman. He offered Brown, who came on an official visit. WSU was courting him, envisioning him as a running back.

Brown made a quiet and brief commitment to rival Washington before landing at Oregon – “Like 10 minutes later,” Brown said, “Coach (Mario) Cristobal and (linebackers) coach (Ken) Wilson are calling me, like, ‘Hey what are you doing? You’re coming to Oregon.’ ” But he had also come to know Dickert and the Cougs’ staff.

That came in handy last winter. In early January, shortly after Brown announced he was entering the transfer portal, he and his mother came to Pullman for his visit. Before long, Sarah Brown could sense her son was at the right place.

“I could just tell when we got there, it felt like sort of what they say. It’s like, he’s home,” Sarah Brown said. “He was smiling. I watched him and the linebackers coach (Schmedding), they just started having these conversations, and it was like listening to them talk to each other in a foreign language. And I just knew he was home. It’s where he’s supposed to be, it’s where he’s supposed to finish.”

Ten months later, as WSU authors a sparkling season, it’s given Brown a chance to understand more about himself. Sometimes, it’s just about football.

•••

In a lot of ways, Brown and WSU were always on the best kind of collision course. Like two people who aren’t ready for each other in a relationship, Brown wasn’t the right fit for the Cougars out of high school, when he wanted a program that suited his interests: flash, money, prestige.

In hindsight, he doesn’t blame himself for wanting those things. It’s only natural, he understands, especially for a standout who fielded all manner of offers out of high school: Washington, USC, UCLA, Oregon, Cal. A teenage Brown had wide eyes, and he went to the school with the most stuff.

The Cougs can’t offer the same kind of stuff, but they can offer football. They can offer a slower pace of life, a chance to earn playing time, a distractions-free environment with the game at the heart of everything. As a teen, Brown didn’t see the value in something like that. As a 21-year-old, he wouldn’t feel at home anywhere else.

“That’s where I’m at,” Brown said. “I look at it like this: Obviously, my goal is always to go to the next level, and I think there’s no better place to do it than somewhere that focuses mainly on you as a man and you as a football player. There’s not a whole lot of outside noises or distractions that can take you from that. So I think here’s a great place for that.”