As a high school senior two years ago, Hank Brown helped lead Nashville’s Lipscomb Academy to a 13-0 record and the TSSAA Division II-AA title, with the Mustangs repeating as state champions in their fourth and final season being coached by Trent Dilfer.
The former NFL quarterback is now in his second season as the head coach at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Dilfer was hardly surprised when he saw that Brown had made a mostly pristine starting debut for the Auburn Tigers last Saturday, avoiding blunders even during stretches when heavy rain was falling.
To Dilfer, who quarterbacked the Baltimore Ravens to a victory in Super Bowl XXXV to cap the NFL’s 2000 season, the performance in the Tigers’ 45-19 home win against New Mexico showcased one of Brown’s greatest assets: the poise to weigh risk versus reward and avoid costly mistakes.
“He’s never going to make it worse,” said Dilfer, who then used a golf analogy to explain Brown’s on-field makeup. “It’s always going to be par or better. He’s Scottie Scheffler and Tiger Woods at their prime. Like, they’re not going to give it away. They might get beat, but they’re not giving it away. Hank’s going to make his pars and fit in his birdies. He’s not going to make a lot of bogeys or double bogeys.”
As the Tigers (2-1) prepare to host Arkansas (2-1) on Saturday, though, the course is expected to get tougher with the start of Southeastern Conference play.
Brown beat out more heralded candidates to enter the season as fifth-year senior Payton Thorne’s top backup, but the redshirt freshman moved into the starting job after Thorne was intercepted four times in a 21-14 loss to California two weeks ago.
The 6-foot-4, 208-pound Brown was 17-of-25 passing for 235 yards with four touchdowns to four players against New Mexico. His text afterward to Dilfer: “Lots to clean up.”
Of course, that came against a winless team and a defense that actually moved up a notch from dead last in the Football Bowl Sudivision to to No. 132 after that game. Now come the Razorbacks, whose lone loss was 39-31 in double overtime to Oklahoma State, which was ranked 16th at the time and is currently 14th.
“It’s definitely an uptick in competition,” said Brown, who was solid off the bench in his only outing last season, Auburn’s 31-13 loss to Maryland in the Music City Bowl, which took him back to Nashville. “They’re definitely going to be a better defense than what we faced last week. You know, I’m excited for it.”
After leading Lipscomb to the state title, Brown had planned to play at Liberty University for coach Hugh Freeze, who had been recruiting him much of his high school career. Then Freeze left for Auburn, taking the former Ole Miss coach back to the SEC, and Brown followed after considering joining Dilfer at UAB.
“It’s so cool, because he’s seen this vision the whole time,” Brown said of Freeze. “I think both of us have. Just being able to, you know, fully see it through and be able to play for him and grow together in our relationship is just an honor.”
Freeze said he always believed Brown “had this ‘it’ factor to him as an individual.”
“I’ve always had this kind of sneaking belief that he had something to him, and now we’re getting ready to find out at what level,” Freeze said. “There’s no question he does. At what level is that at right now compared to the rest of the SEC, we’re getting ready to find out.”
Brown wasn’t highly recruited out of high school. He was rated the nation’s No. 71 quarterback in his signing class and a three-star prospect, according to the 247Sports composite rankings.
He had arrived at Lipscomb before his junior year after father Eric — a three-time NCAA Division III All-American soccer player at Wheaton College in Illinois — moved the family from Chicago for his work.
The Browns picked Lipscomb even though it meant Hank spending a year behind Luther Richesson, who quarterbacked Lipscomb to its 2021 state title, wound up signing with the University of Cincinnati and is now at Middle Tennessee State University. Brown did start in a preseason game for the Mustangs — without ever taking a practice snap with the first-string offense — against a higher classification team after Richesson and other starters got sick.
“He went out and threw for like 370 (yards), and I said, ‘Well, we’ve got two really good ones,'” Dilfer recalled. “It was kind of from that moment on I knew that Hank was going to be a great player.”
Brown might have been underrated as a prospect by coaches assuming he was a product of the offensive system, said Dilfer, who spent 14 years in the NFL and also helped start the Elite 11 Academy to train high school quarterbacks considered college prospects.
“I kind of know what they look like,” Dilfer said. “I think Hank was underrecruited because we were so good offensively. I think people said, ‘Well golly, this offense is the best in the country. Anybody can do this.’ What they didn’t realize is that that’s because of Hank.”