MG: I read somewhere that you referred to JUCO as “football jail”. Would you say that JUCO football is more intense than NCAA football?
JB: Football jail to me is Junior College. You got to come in and get out. I do believe that junior college in every sense of the word is more rugged, harder, tougher, less resourceful, and every possibility is a lot harder at junior college than it is at the next level. That’s why we are harder on the kids than it is at the next level. Bottom line is there they are going to get a great meal plan, great housing situation, tons of gear, tons of tutoring help, a thousand computer labs and we don’t have the resources to do that. So we have to explain to them that this is a trampoline, you need to jump in and out of here and get out as fast as possible, and we’ll do that as a staff for you if you meet us halfway. So yes JUCO football is harder, but also the most rewarding feeling as a coach is to get those kids to the next level.
No four-year coach can do what we do. I’m just telling you right now. Ask Coach [Nick] Saban or Coach [Pete] Carrol, they know junior college is not for everybody. If I ran the NCAA, I would make a rule that every kid needs to go to JUCO for one year coming out of high school. I bet you wouldn’t have the problems that you have right now at the four-year level.
But that’s just me.
MG: Greg, what do you hope that viewers will get from watching Coach Brown and the cast of season three?
GW: I think that we are able to provide a perspective on the sport of football that you won’t find anywhere else. We are able to explore a story from a demographic of people who are a really strange confluence of unbelievable talent and in some cases, really difficult backgrounds, and trying to bring it all together during the course of a football season where you need a lot of things to go right such as health, team success, and as a player, you need academics to click for you in a way that has never clicked for you previously. You’re getting kids at a certain point in their life where they are really trying to figure out who they are. They are making decisions at that age that are going to violently set you down one path or another, and it is such a privilege to be able to film human beings as they are making those decisions. Because of their generosity and our cameras, we are able to document an element of the human experience that is unique. I’ve said it for the last two seasons: It is a privilege to do this show and to show a very popular sport from a perspective that I don’t think has ever been shown before.
MG: Dealing from such a raw perspective with the players and their backgrounds, was it hard to not get emotionally involved?
GW: I don’t think you can help but get emotionally involved. It’s impossible to spend as much time as we spend with these players and coaches, and not become emotionally invested and develop an enormous amount of empathy, but I think you need to do that and you’re not doing your job as a story teller if not. You’re not going to be able to elicit empathy from your audience if you, yourself doesn’t have it.
There is a difference between being the coach and being the filmmaker who’s documenting the coach; Our job is to document that process and I have faith that in doing that job well, there will be good that results from it.
I believe there is something inherently good about authentically documenting someone’s humanity and telling their story with compassion, but from a cold eye. That sometimes means that your heart is going to break somewhere along the way, as you see someone whose dreams are about to come together, and either through some poor choices made by them, or circumstances that are outside of their control, the dream doesn’t, and it’s very difficult to watch people that you care about go through that.