Brian Cochran’s career came full circle during the 2016 football season.
The new University of Tennessee at Chattanooga defensive line coach coached the same position group for the John Carroll team that ended Mount Union’s 112-game regular-season win streak. That propelled the Blue Streaks to their first Ohio Athletic Conference championship since 1989 and first win over Mount Union since then.
Cochran was also a part of that 1989 team, as an All-America nose tackle and first-team All-OAC selection on the program’s only outright championship in its history. He was inducted into JCU’s Hall of Fame in 2011.
His coaching career included a four-year stint (2003-06) as the head coach at Division III Heidelburg University in Ohio, with two years also as the school’s head wrestling coach, as well as assistant jobs as Ohio Northern University and MacMurray College in Illinois. He went back to John Carroll in 2006, serving in a variety of roles with the school including six seasons as the defensive coordinator.
He showed an ability to adjust, moving to a full-time defensive line coach position in 2013 and helping oversee the adjustment from a four-man to a three-man front. As coaches all around him have changed – the Blue Streaks had two defensive coordinators, four outside linebacker coaches and numerous secondary coaches – the program still had the first, sixth, eighth and third best defenses in Division III in Tom Arth’s time as head coach.