Brennan Marion is expected to hire longtime Power 4 assistant and former Minnesota head coach Tim Brewster as his senior associate head coach at Sacramento State, according to a report Tuesday from Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports.
Marion and Brewster have not worked together previously, but the fit is obvious: Brewster, 64, has been in coaching longer than the 37-year-old Marion has been alive.
Brewster entered coaching as a graduate assistant at Purdue in 1986 and, after two years at an Indiana high school, landed a job on Mack Brown's North Carolina staff coaching tight ends and special teams. There, Brewster quickly gained a reputation as an energetic recruiter, riding shotgun as he helped Brown turn the Tar Heels from a 1-10 doormat into a 10-game winner three times in five seasons and finished the 1997 campaign ranked No. 6 in the AP poll, the program's highest finish since 1948. He then joined Brown at Texas, where he helped the future College Football Hall of Famer execute a quick turnaround of the Longhorns. Brewster coaching tight ends in the NFL by the time Brown won the 2005 national championship, but he still deserves a major helping of credit: he's the assistant widely credited with landing Vince Young.
After stints with the Chargers and Broncos, Brewster returned to college football in 2007 as the head coach at Minnesota, where he went 15-30 in four seasons.
From there, Brewster would go on to coach tight ends at Mississippi State, Florida State (where he won the 2013 national title), Texas A&M, North Carolina, Florida, Jackson State, Colorado and Charlotte. He was the 49ers' interim head coach last season, serving as the bridge between Biff Poggi and Tim Albin.
Now, he's set to serve as a key advisor to Marion, a first-time college head coach who quickly rose the ranks from a high school head coach, to quality control staffer, to Division II assistant, to FCS coordinator, to FBS assistant, and then to FBS coordinator. At UNLV the past two seasons, the Rebels ranked in the top 25 nationally in scoring and rose from 86th in rushing in the year prior to Marion's arrival to seventh this past season. Along the way, UNLV went 19-8 overall, appeared in two Mountain West title games, and recorded the first AP Top 25 finish in program history. UNLV finished No. 8 in FootballScoop's Year End Top 25.
Though the school's stated desire of FBS membership will not come to fruition anytime soon, Brewster will provide an added layer of perspective for a program that plans on operating above its station. Along with Brewster, Marion has hired defensive coordinator Marcus Patton (Colorado State), special teams coordinator Rob Wegner (Minnesota), tight ends coach Robbie Bell (Georgia Tech), wide receivers coach Sidhart Krishnamurthi (San Jose State), and edges coach Jake Vang (Colorado State) from FBS institutions.