Catching Up With All-Pro LB Chad Brown, Who Brought Deadly Strike to Seahawks' Defense
The average human eye blinks at a span of 100 milliseconds, which means you might miss the strike of a snake, as some serpents can strike at their prey at speeds much faster, even around 70 milliseconds.
It also means an offensive tackle might have missed the nearly as quick and almost as deadly skills of linebacker Chad Brown during his 15-year NFL career, which spanned from 1993 to 2007.
Brown was selected in the second round of the 1993 NFL Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers after a Hall of Fame college career with the Colorado Buffaloes. There, he began his career under the tutelage of freshly minted Hall of Fame coach Bill Cowher, with the aptly nicknamed "Blitzburgh" defense.
While in Pittsburgh, Brown became a Pro Bowler and All-Pro in 1996 with 81 tackles, 13.0 sacks, three forced fumbles, and two interceptions.
As one of the league's prized free agents in 1997, he arrived in Seattle under coach Dennis Erickson, who won two national titles at the helm with the Miami Hurricanes. There, Brown blossomed even further, finishing second in the NFL with 149 tackles in 1998 along with 7.5 sacks and an interception, earning Pro Bowl and First-Team All-Pro honors.
For Brown, his transition from a second-round pick to an All-Pro linebacker started with his mentality and preparation.
"I figured out my learning style. I also figured out my playing style," Brown said in an exclusive interview with Seahawk Maven. "Unfortunately, I was not the biggest, strongest or fastest of guys... I understood leverage. But I think in the end, it came down to my willingness to simply play harder than you were. And at some point, you are going to want to take a play off and I am simply going to be willing to play harder than you are and I am not going to take plays off. And over the course of the game, that attitude starts to overwhelm people."
The Colorado product certainly did overwhelm opposing offenses during his career with the Seahawks, racking up 743 tackles, including 574 solo take downs, along with 48.0 sacks. He ranks fourth and fifth in franchise history in those categories respectively.
Looking back at his career, Brown enjoyed the "game within the game" that came with matching up against opposing players each week.
"It becomes a chess match between you and your one-on-one matchups, but also a bit of a chess match with yourself. You know, ‘hey, I am a little gassed, how am I going to feel in the fourth quarter?’ Don’t worry about the fourth quarter, let’s just worry about the next play. The fourth quarter will take care of itself when we get there. I just want to tap into enough energy for the next play. And if I do that 60 to 75 times on a Sunday, and I bring all that effort every single time, I usually walk off of that field feeling pretty good about what I did."
When he hung up his cleats in 2007, Brown finished with three Pro Bowls (earning his last selection in 1999), two All-Pro selections, 1,091 combined tackles, and 79 sacks.
Life after football has been just as exciting, if not more so for the savvy businessman.
Currently, Brown works in sports media, having called football games on the radio and television for ESPN and PAC-12 Network in the past. He also hosts a radio show for 104.3 The Fan in Denver along with his private business endeavors.
Brown's off-field passion is animals, specifically reptiles. As if being an NFL football player for over a decade and earning plenty of accolades along the way wasn't enough, he gets his thrills in places like the jungles of Costa Rica, the Texan-Mexican border, the deserts of California, and the islands of Indonesia, seeking knowledge and experience regarding reptiles, especially snakes.
Among his bevy of stories, Brown had the honor of bringing an unknown species of python to modern science for study and documentation from a remote location in Indonesia.
"We were able to take the python, photograph it, document it, all that kind of stuff. In the end, about a month later, after all the different papers were written, I was a participant in bringing a new species of python to Western science."
Like the snakes he enjoys studying and interacting with, Brown built an NFL career based on relentless effort and deadly strikes of the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage. He now applies that same reptile-like tenacity to his business and family life and has found similar success to his NFL accomplishments.
