COLORADO SPRINGS — Matt Brown’s summer wasn’t anything remotely resembling Johnny Manziel’s. They’re both quarterbacks, and renowned at their respective levels. Brown, though, is a little more sedate and cerebral, and the Colorado School of Mines quarterback worked this summer for Black Eagle Energy Services, a pipeline construction company, as a safety intern.
“I kind of helped manage the company’s safety policies,” Brown, a petroleum engineering major, said recently at the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference football preview. “We’d go out in the field and oversee operations.”
Brown was The Denver Post’s Gold Helmet Award winner — for football and academic prowess — in 2009 as a senior at Limon High School. As a redshirt sophomore for the Orediggers last season, he threw for an average of 352 yards per game. The Orediggers went 6-5 overall and 4-5 in the Division II RMAC. Coach Bob Stitt hopes for more balance and a better running game this season, so if Brown’s numbers slip, that might be a good sign.
Stitt agreed during the recruiting process that he wouldn’t stand in the way of Brown also playing baseball at Mines as a pitcher, so this is a rare instance of an entrenched No. 1 quarterback not even going through spring drills.
“I went to the spring football meetings and watched and kept up when I could,” Brown said. “So really all I was doing was not taking the reps. I still keep up with everything being installed.”
Said Stitt: “If he wasn’t so football-smart, it would be a struggle not going through spring ball. But we can sit down for two days and he’s got it; he doesn’t make too many mental errors out there.”
One of Brown’s recent Mines quarterback predecessors was 2006 Gold Helmet winner Clay Garcia, from Alamosa, now a mechanical engineer in Houston.
The preseason RMAC coaches poll picked the Ore- diggers to finish fourth in the league.
Stitt said one advantage this season will be having 22 seniors, virtually unprecedented at the engineering school because of attrition in the program, tied to the academic rigors or even players deciding engineering isn’t for them.
“It’s really, really tough on a kid to make it through Mines without anything else,” Stitt said. “You throw football in there and all the things involved, it’s really, really tough. Our graduation rate for normal students is between 60 and 70 percent. You’re talking about kids with an average ACT score of 29 and a math of 30, and one out of three kids isn’t making it. And when you throw football in there, and other things, just to get double digits in seniors is huge. Twenty-two is fantastic.”
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