No longer interim: Isaac Brown is officially Wichita State men’s basketball coach
Wichita State has agreed to make current interim head coach Isaac Brown the permanent coach of the men’s basketball program, athletic director Darron Boatright confirmed to The Wichita Eagle on Friday afternoon.
In a release, WSU announced Brown has verbally agreed to a five-year contract and will be introduced as the program’s 26th head coach on Monday. According to a source with knowledge of the situation, the contract will be worth close to $6 million in total with Brown earning $1 million the first two years and then $1.25 million for the final three years of the deal with incentives still yet to be negotiated.
Brown has gained almost unanimous support from former players, current players, national media members and fans with the job he has done this season on an interim basis following the resignation of the program’s coaching victory leader, Gregg Marshall, eight days before the start of the season.
Wichita State (13-4, 9-2 AAC) heads to the final week of the regular season in March in sole possession of first place in the American Athletic Conference and has a chance of returning to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2018. The Shockers are coming off a victory over their highest-ranked opponent at home in 54 years and have ended long losing streaks to Houston and Cincinnati this season.
All under the leadership of Brown, who has guided a team with seven newcomers that was picked to finish seventh in the preseason conference poll through unprecedented adversity, from the internal investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of the program’s iconic head coach, to COVID-19 issues that were to blame for a 1-2 start to the season.
Not bad for a lifetime assistant who got his first chance at a head coaching job at any level at the age of 51. Brown is not only the school’s first Black men’s basketball coach, but also the first Black coach at a Division I program in the history of the state of Kansas.
“I’m just so excited for these kids with all that they’ve went through,” Brown said after the Houston win. “And I’m so happy for the fans, and I’m also happy for the players that they’re getting this attention now.”
While Brown was too modest to talk about his success, the coaching job he has done this season for WSU has been universally praised following the win over Houston. Almost every member of the national media has called for WSU to remove the interim tag and give Brown the job permanently.
Brown, who became an assistant coach at WSU in 2014, also has the backing of many prominent former players, including notable alumni such as Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker. Even former Shockers who didn’t play under Brown have given him the stamp of approval.
WSU had zero transfers following Marshall’s resignation. Every one of the players came to Wichita to play for Marshall, but they stayed because they believed in Brown. It’s been obvious by the way they celebrate with their coach after games.
“They need to give him the job,” WSU leading scorer Tyson Etienne said previously. “We’ve had a lot of stuff going on within our program this year and the way we’ve handled it has been something really good and something really remarkable. And not just IB, our entire coaching staff has done a great job of banding us together and leading us. IB has done an amazing job and I believe he’s going to get the job. I hope he does. I’m rocking with him.”
Keeping their jobs may have felt like a longshot to start the season, but the current coaching staff viewed this season as a chance to prove themselves and they operated like they were coaching for their jobs. Now Brown, as well as his staff of assistants Lou Gudino, Tyson Waterman and Billy Kennedy, player development coach Nick Jones and director of operations Dominic Okon can breathe a sigh of relief that their hard work has been rewarded.
For an earlier story on Brown’s success this season, Boatright told The Eagle that he had checked every box possible with his performance this season.
“Isaac and all of the coaching staff have done a fantastic job,” Boatright said, “and Isaac is doing everything he needs to and focusing on the team and the next game. He’s eliminated as many distractions as he can. I’m very happy with the results.”
Brown has always been well-liked by players because he was a former star player himself and can relate to players on that level. He has been respected for his coaching chops and known to put together a diligent scouting report. Still, those qualities don’t always translate to success when an assistant coach slides over 12 inches to the first chair on the bench.
This “X” factor can be tough to define, but whatever “it” is, Brown has it.
“I think the most impressive thing about what he has done is how he’s kept this program together,” Waterman said. “Just the relationships he’s built with these young men to get them to trust him. Even myself, as a grown man, I was a little discouraged after all of that went down before the season. We had to deal with so many things that people don’t even know about, but IB kept everyone focused.
“There were so many concerns coming into this season, but that’s what IB does so well. He pays attention to these young men and he’s able to reach them and gain their trust and get them to play for them the way he does. The guy is like a magnet. People just love IB, myself included. It’s an amazing thing.”
What the players say they love about Brown is how genuine he is. There is a charm to Brown, whether it’s from his Southern drawl or benevolent personality, and he’s an easy person to like. In a testament to his low maintenance personality, Brown is working out of the WSU men’s basketball conference room instead of the head coach’s office at Koch Arena. He treats his players, from Etienne, the star player, to Jaden Seymour and Chaunce Jenkins, freshmen who aren’t in the rotation, the same way. He doesn’t sugar-coat criticism during film sessions, practices or games, but he also doesn’t deliver it in a demeaning way.
That’s why the players put their full trust in him at the beginning of the season.
“When I first got this job, we told the kids, ‘You guys have to trust us. We’re going to give you 110% every day. We can’t let anybody in our circle. Just trust us,’” Brown said. “We started slow, but we never thought we had a bad basketball team. We didn’t make any excuses and those guys kept battling and kept getting better and they kept believing. We trust them and they trust us.”
WSU has won 12 of its past 14 games, but it hasn’t done so without flaws. The team’s defensive rebounding, annually a source of pride for the program, has plummeted to one of the worst rates in the country. WSU has also made it a habit to play in close games, sometimes making victories harder.
Being a first-time coach, Brown will face questions about if he can have sustained success — and recruit at a high-enough level to compete in the American without Marshall’s name recognition. Those are legitimate questions going forward.
But Brown has answered just about every possible question he could have with his work this season. The Shockers may not earn many style points, but they have simply won with Brown. He has shown his ability to make in-game adjustments and be a calming presence on the sideline, like when WSU trailed Houston by 12 points in the first half and rallied for its signature win. Under Brown’s guidance, the Shockers are 9-1 in two-possession games and have snapped long losing streaks to Houston and Cincinnati this season.
“He was so composed during the Houston game,” Waterman said. “He just kept telling them, ‘It’s a game of runs. They made their run, now we’re going to make our run.’ I think because he was so calm, that calmed our guys down and kept them believing.”
For the past 19 years, Brown has toiled away in relative anonymity as a Division I assistant coach. He’s still adjusting to life in the spotlight, as the Houston win has made his coaching job in Wichita the talk of several national outlets.
Brown didn’t haggle with WSU for a new contract before the start of the season. He is still working under the previous contract that paid him $210,000, not even the highest on the staff, as an assistant coach.
That will be rectified following this season, Boatright told The Eagle. The athletic director said he has spoken with Brown and the two have verbally agreed on an increased amount of compensation that will be finalized after this season. And now it will be part of a full-time contract.
This story was originally published February 26, 2021 at 2:50 PM.
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