A matter of trust: Why Darius Brown II followed his coach from Big Sky country to Cache Valley

LOGAN — The way Danny Sprinkle looks at it, he owes point guard Darius Brown II and power forward Great Osobor a lot for taking a chance on him.

Not once, but twice.

“They could have stayed in the Big Sky and won the Big Sky,” Utah State’s head coach proclaims. “Like you could have coached that team. They didn’t even need a coach with the players we had.

“They took a chance on coming not only to Montana State, but then they took a chance on coming here. They trusted us, and they knew that we cared about them.”

And now Aggie Nation loves all three of them.

Utah State (26-5 overall, 14-4 in the Mountain West) has emerged as one of the best stories in all of college basketball this season, going from being slated to finish ninth in the conference’s preseason poll to securing its first-ever outright Mountain West championship Saturday night with an unforgettable 87-65 win over New Mexico at the Spectrum.

Ranked 18th in the latest AP Top 25 poll, the Aggies head into the Mountain West postseason tournament this week in Las Vegas with a lot of hardware to their name as they try to improve their seeding résumé for the NCAA Tournament. Most notably, Osobor was named MW Player of the Year and Newcomer of the Year on Tuesday, while Sprinkle was tabbed as MW Coach of the Year and junior guard Josh Uduje picked up Co-Sixth Man of the Year honors along with New Mexico forward Mustapha Amzil.

Brown joined Osobor as an all-conference first-team selection and was also named to the MW Defensive Team. Senior guard Ian Martinez received an honorable mention nod.

Strangely enough, Osobor might have garnered the POY award without a vote from his own head coach.

In the postgame press conference following the win over the Lobos, Sprinkle was clearly still riding high after Brown had knocked down a 3-pointer with under five seconds left to put the Aggies out in front for good. It was yet another clutch trey from Brown that Sprinkle had already seen his point guard pull off at UNLV and Fresno State, only this time it was for the outright Mountain West title and the top seed in the conference tournament.

Struggling to find a way to describe the magnitude of Brown’s heroics, Sprinkle leaned on a baseball comparison, deftly leaving out the expletive in the middle of Aaron Boone’s name that dejected Red Sox fans gave the Yankees’ third baseman following his ALCS-clinching home run in 2003.

“The way it ended, I mean what did they say about Aaron Boone? Like Aaron … Boone. It’s Darius … Brown,” Sprinkle proclaimed. “And if he’s not the league MVP, I’m never voting again. And I’m dead serious.

“I say this in an endearing way, but this is a group of misfits, and it’s unbelievable how he’s led this group,” Sprinkle added. “I think he’s basically hit at least five game-winning shots in conference play. When this team needs him, they know they can count on him, and he knows he can count on anybody else, too.”

Starting from scratch

It’s been well documented that Sprinkle, who inherited zero returning points from USU’s 2022-23 season, has been able to strike gold in Cache Valley thanks to his connections with the Treasure State — most notably the close-knit duo of Brown and Osobor.

The head coach at Montana State for four years before being hired by USU last spring, Sprinkle won 52 games and back-to-back conference tournaments during his final two seasons at his alma mater. Osobor played a minor role as a freshman in 2021-22, before thriving in the role of the Bobcats’ sixth man last year, averaging 10.1 points and 4.6 rebounds while mostly coming off the bench.

Meanwhile, Brown, who made his way to Bozeman during the summer of 2022 after spending four years at Cal State Northridge, elevated his game in Big Sky country, averaging 9.1 points, 4.9 assists and 4.4 rebounds. The senior from Pasadena, California, was also named the 2022-23 Big Sky Defensive Player of the Year.

But once their coach left for Logan, Brown and Osobor put their names in the transfer portal, and according to Sprinkle, they had more lucrative NIL opportunities than Utah State.

“They left a lot of friends in a great college town to come here to another great college town, and I don’t look at that as a basketball deal,” Sprinkle says. “They left because of personal relationships and trust in us, and that means a lot because they were offered a lot of money to go other places.

“I’m not scared to say that,” Sprinkle adds. “They passed up a lot of money to come with us. And that probably means more than anything.”

Trust over money

Brown, who played the final home game of his six-year collegiate career on Saturday, confirms that he had what some people might have viewed as better opportunities than following Sprinkle to Utah State, but the 24-year-old didn’t want to specify what those offers were.

“Once you hit that portal, it’s just like war,” he says. “Your phone doesn’t stop ringing. Schools just call, and they’re like, ‘We can get you this. And we can get you that.’ And it’s hard not to listen.

“But the thing that I wanted more than anything my last year was not to have to deal with a new system and trying to get to know everything. I knew there was just more security playing for (Sprinkle), and that I wouldn’t have to change myself for the team to be successful.”

Sprinkle first saw Brown play in college when he was an assistant coach at Cal State Fullerton and the Titans played CS Northridge when Brown was a freshman. Brown got his collegiate career off to a strong start that season, starting 32 games while averaging 8.3 points and 5.2 assists for a Matadors team that went 13-21. So, Sprinkle and his staff at Montana State went after the 6-foot-2 guard hard when he put his name in the transfer portal in March 2022, even though Brown was coming off a serious injury.

In Northridge’s ninth game of the 2021-22 season, Brown was driving to the basket against Fresno State when he hurt his left knee. Diagnosed with a tibial plateau fracture, Brown didn’t need surgery on the knee but was granted a medical hardship waiver by the NCAA and says he “didn’t touch a ball” for nearly seven months.

“I think he trusted me because he had seen me play beforehand,” Brown said of Sprinkle. “Even though I didn’t play almost that entire year, he still felt I could help the team. And we just hit it off right away.”

‘One of the best players’

And once Brown relocated to Bozeman, so did he and Osobor. The two teammates currently share an apartment, and their connection on and off the court has been evident since the first game of the season as the duo helped the Aggies get off to a 16-1 start.

“(Brown) will beat himself up if he doesn’t score 10 points or whatever, but he does so much for our team, whether he’s guarding the primary ball handler on the other team or orchestrating our whole offense. He has the ball in his hands the whole time,” Osobor says.

“He’s one of the best players I’ve played with my whole life, and when you play with someone like that, it gives you a lot of confidence.”

Osobor has led Utah State in scoring all season long and is currently averaging 17.8 points and 8.9 rebounds per game. Brown, who has been the unquestioned leader on the court for the Aggies during their remarkable run, is third on the team in scoring at 13.6 points per game, and he was spectacular in USU’s wins over San Jose State and New Mexico last week.

On Saturday, Brown not only delivered Utah State’s biggest basket since Sam Merrill’s game-winning 3-pointer against fifth-ranked San Diego State in the championship game of the 2020 Mountain West tournament, but he ended up totaling 19 points, nine assists and six rebounds while playing over 39 minutes.

And Brown, who is the reigning Mountain West Player of the Week, only shot 3-pointers against the Spartans on March 6, knocking down his first five attempts and going 7 for 9 on his way to a team-high 21 points in a 90-70 win over SJSU.

“I felt really good in shootaround, that’s about all I can say,” says Brown, who is shooting 40.4% from beyond the arc and leads the Aggies in 3-pointers this season with 57. “I was feeling confident, like I could make any shot I took.”

Despite feeling that way, Brown insists that the game at San Jose was “more stressful than you think.”

“There was a lot of thinking that last eight minutes,” Brown says of him and his team trying to hold onto their lead — unusually large of late — down the stretch.

But that’s to be expected from a floor general like Brown, who takes great pride in his assist-to-turnover ratio — currently best in the Mountain West and seventh in the country at 3.47 — and is just as serious about defense as he is offense.

Future coach

“No doubt,” Sprinkle replies when asked if he sees Brown being a coach someday, like current Aggie graduate assistant Xavier Bishop, who also played for him at Montana State.

“He’s very similar to Xavier. And he knows I’m really hard on point guards — X can tell you that too — but that’s why they are who they are. It’s getting them out of their comfort zone and being a leader, which you have to do as a coach. And he’s gonna be a great coach one day.”

In addition to usually making the right choices when it comes to passing the ball, and anticipating when and where to strike defensively, Brown also has a knack for realizing what his role is as a scorer. Osobor has garnered more and more attention defensively as the season has worn on, often leaving USU guard’s open on the perimeter when he’s been double- and triple-teamed in the post.

Sometimes that best secondary option has been Martinez or freshman guard Mason Falslev, but lately Brown has shouldered more of the offensive load. The oldest of Darius and Leah Brown’s three sons has averaged 16.8 points and 5.5 assists per night over the past eight games while shooting 60.3% (44 for 73) from the field, 58.5% (24 for 41) from 3-point range and 84.6% (22 of 26) from the free-throw line.

And that includes Brown’s unbelievable performance in USU’s 77-73 victory at Fresno State on Feb. 27. In that wild affair, Brown stunned the small crowd at the Save Mart Center by banking in a game-tying 3-pointer with two seconds left in regulation, then all but sealing the win with another trey with 35 seconds to go in overtime.

Able to walk off proud and very happy — far different from his previous game at Fresno State — Brown logged a total of 44 minutes that night, continuing a trend that now has the graduate guard averaging a team- and conference-high 35.7 minutes per game. Even in USU’s relatively comfortable outing at San Jose, he played 38 minutes.

But Brown says he’s been preparing for this moment ever since he made the decision to transfer to Utah State.

“That’s what the hard conditioning in the summer was for,” Brown insists. “That was another conversation I had with (Sprinkle). ‘You have to be in shape to play this year. There’s going to be times when I can’t take you out. That’s why this summer is going to be so hard. It’s a trade-off.’

“Obviously I’m sore all of the time and all of that stuff, but the minutes are absolutely fine,” Brown insists. “It’s what’s needed.”

Sprinkle seconds that thought. And considering that the Aggies are 9-0 this season in games decided by five or fewer points, it’s easy to see why he wants his veteran point guard on the floor as much as possible.

“As a coach, you’re just so comfortable with him on the floor,” Sprinkle says of Brown. “He’s been through so many high-level games during his career, there’s just a certain level of trust that you have when he’s out on the floor. And I think the players feel that, too.”