‘I’m so proud of him’: Ole Miss coach on game against former player, WSU’s Isaac Brown

It’s been a little more than 30 years since Kermit Davis visited the home of Isaac Brown in Pascagoula, Mississippi, to recruit him to the Texas A&M men’s basketball team for the 1990-91 season.

Now the two will meet again some three decades later, when Brown, the interim head coach at Wichita State, brings his Shockers (5-2) to The Pavilion in Oxford to take on Davis’ Mississippi Rebels (5-2) for a 5 p.m. showdown on ESPNU. Current WSU assistant coach Billy Kennedy was also an assistant on Davis’ staff that season.

Davis said he was ecstatic to see Brown finally receive an opportunity to be a head coach.

“I’m so proud of Isaac Brown,” Davis said in a phone interview. “He’s done a terrific job and there’s no better guy in our business. I’ve known for a long time that Isaac is a really good coach and now he’s getting to show it. I’m just so proud of him and what he’s done and especially the job he’s doing right now for Wichita State.”

Brown, a 6-foot-1 scoring guard in his day, averaged 12.0 points, 2.3 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 0.9 steals in his one season under Davis at Texas A&M, but he missed the end of the season due to academic issues.

It was a situation that Brown said he learned and matured from as he transferred and finished his career at Louisiana Monroe. Looking back on the experience, Brown is grateful for his time being coached by Davis in College Station.

“It taught me you’ve got to work hard and always try to get better every single day,” Brown said. “Coach (Davis) always preached about putting in the work. Me being a young guy, I thought the game was about having talent, but he taught me it’s about working hard and getting better. That’s something that I carried with me my whole career.”

A hard-working team is what Brown sees on film in Ole Miss, which features one of the best defenses in the country. The Rebels hold teams to 56.9 points (ninth nationally), force 19.7 turnovers (10th) and limit opponents to 36.9% shooting (13th).

Davis was hired by Ole Miss in 2018 following a successful 16-year run at Middle Tennessee State because of how hard his teams played. Now that he’s working with more talented and athletic players, his team is even more dangerous, Brown said.

“Coach (Davis) was always someone who could take lesser talent and get those guys to play hard and get them to execute offensively,” Brown said. “He won two NCAA Tournament games at Middle (including a 15-over-2 seed upset of Michigan State in 2016). Even though those other teams had more talent, they didn’t play as hard as Middle and that’s something that his teams have always been able to do.”

In the first part of this two-game series last season, WSU easily handled Ole Miss in a 74-54 victory last January at Koch Arena behind a 29-point performance from Erik Stevenson. But the Shockers are a much different team just one year later. For starters, coach Gregg Marshall is no longer with the team, and after graduation and a rash of transfers, players who accounted for 62 of those 74 points in last year’s game are no longer on the roster.

The Shockers have won their first two road games this season and are in the midst of a four-game winning streak, but Saturday might be their toughest challenge yet. Ole Miss is a great offensive rebounding team (one of WSU’s weaknesses), features a top-10 defense and has one of the best veteran players in the SEC in senior guard Devontae Shuler (13.9 points, 3.3 assists).

“It’s going to be a tough test going on the road playing an SEC team that’s a really good basketball team,” Brown said. “It’s going to come down to us executing on offense without turning it over. They really try to get up in you and pressure you. We’ve done a good job of taking care of the basketball, so someone is going to win that battle. And our other big key is making sure we’re boxing them out. We can’t allow them too many second shots.”

The trip to Mississippi is a homecoming of sorts for Brown, who will be back in his home state (although Oxford is more than five hours away from his hometown on the Gulf Coast). Brown is also a Hall of Famer at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College from his playing days.

This won’t be the first time Brown has coached against Davis. In fact, Brown, as an assistant, has gone up against Davis-led teams nine times dating to their days in the Sun Belt Conference, when Brown was an assistant at South Alabama (2002-07) and Davis was at Middle Tennessee State.

“I’m not really focused (on the coaching matchup),” Brown said. “The focus has been on those kids and trying to prepare them, because I know coach Davis is a great coach and he’ll have those kids ready to go.

“I know how hard his teams play and I know they’ll be prepared, so that means we’re going to have to play hard and execute in order to have a chance to win this game.”

Wichita State at Mississippi

Records: WSU 5-2, Ole Miss 5-2

When: 5 p.m.

Where: The Pavilion, Oxford, Miss. (10% capacity of 9,500)

TV: ESPNU (Dave Neal and Debbie Antonelli)

Radio: KEYN, 103.7-FM

Series: Tied at 3-3

This story was originally published January 1, 2021 at 2:12 PM.

Taylor Eldridge

The Wichita Eagle

316-268-6270

Wichita State athletics beat reporter. Bringing you closer to the Shockers you love and inside the sports you love to watch.