“Every single day was a battle for me — my will vs. God’s will,” said Brown, a devout evangelical Christian who officially left YSU last week to join Liberty’s staff as an associate head coach under Turner Gill, a close friend and former Husker quarterback.
It wasn’t a battle because of the YSU football players or the Penguin head coach, Bo Pelini, whom Brown followed from NU after both were fired. Brown on Monday said he “loved” Pelini and praised his “public courage.” But coaching in Youngstown, even for a few months, was a sharp change from more than two decades of life in Nebraska, where Brown was an assistant under three head coaches, helped win three national titles and worked in Christian ministries.
Just weeks after his arrival at YSU, the Jambar, Youngstown State’s student newspaper, published an editorial calling Brown’s views on homosexuality “neolithic.” In March, an LGBT advisory committee at the school publicly requested Brown, Pelini and university President Jim Tressel attend sensitivity training.
“I hadn’t even met anybody, really, at the university,” Brown said. “They just kind of went on my reputation at Nebraska.”
The real difficulty, Brown said, was being away from his family. He missed his daughters, Sojourner, a sophomore at New York University, and Bronwyn, a sophomore in high school. More than that, he missed his wife, Molvina Carter. And Brown said he had a revelation about her while in Youngstown.
“I realized that my wife had carried so much of our family and so much of my career with her and I had not given her the time to really appreciate her,” Brown said. “... When you’re in coaching this long, sometimes you overlook how important your wife is. And she’s helped me to see things from a much clearer perspective.”
