While he was building a football reputation as a creative schemer who designed aggressive, unpredictable, sometimes dominant defenses at various NCAA football levels, Brian Newberry was mainly a driven coordinator who rarely, if ever, desired to be a head coach.
 
As he prepares to lead the Navy Midshipmen into their Sept. 9 home opener against Wagner, Newberry, whose term as the school's 39^th head football coach is nearly nine months old, already had greatly enhanced his standing in Annapolis with four seasons of fine work in the defensive coordinator's chair.

"The pinnacle for me was becoming the defensive coordinator here. That is what I had loved doing the most during my career. Being a head coach was never the be-all, end goal for me," Newberry says.
 
"I would not have taken a head coaching job at another school. I know I have got a great staff, great support and players who are so resilient. They never flinch. No matter how tough things get, they keep coming to work. They inspire me," adds Newberry, who has experienced an unusual coaching ride – some chapters more fun and successful than others, some that made him contemplate the idea of trying a new profession.
 
Before landing at Navy, Newberry had made nine combined stops at the Division II, Division III and FCS levels, including his most notable at Kennesaw State. There, Newberry worked for six, career-altering years before getting hired at Navy.
 
At Kennesaw State, Newberry worked under head coach and former Navy assistant Brian Bohannon as the Owls' defensive coordinator/secondary coach. Newberry helped start the Kennesaw program from scratch in 2013 and '14, before the Owls became an FCS power over the next four seasons.
 
Kennesaw advanced to the quarterfinal round of the FCS playoffs in 2017 and '18, in part because its Newberry-led defense did some amazing things.
 
Employing a multiple defense using 4-2-5 and 3-4 principles, the Owlsled the Big South in rushing defense (102 yards per game), pass defense efficiency and red zone defense, while finishing second in sacks (31) in 2017. Kennesaw ranked seventh nationally in scoring defense (15.5 points per game) and third in turnovers forced (35).
 
In 2018, Kennesaw State ranked second in total defense by allowing 263.7 yards per game and allowed the fewest first downs per game (13.5) in the FCS. The Owls finished seventh nationally by surrendering only 15.4 points per game and ranked 11^th in third-down conversion defense.
 
Over those two excellent seasons, during which its defense forced a whopping 56 turnovers, including 37 interceptions, Kennesaw State won 23 of 27 games.
 
Having watched the Owls' defense wreak havoc with all sorts of pressure those two years with Newberry's exotic looks, irregular stunts, confusing pre-snap movement and superb tackling, Bohannon was not surprised to see Newberry move on to the FBS world.
 
Former Kennesaw assistants P.J Volker and Kevin Downing followed Newberry to Navy in early 2019. Downing is now a third-year assistant at the University of Virginia. Volker, who spent the past four years at Navy as linebackers coach, is now Newberry's defensive coordinator. In addition, Newberry hired Grant Chesnut as offensive coordinator/offensive line coach. Chesnut had filled those roles at Kennesaw State since 2014.
 
"Brian is really smart, really creative, great with the guys and just a great person," Bohannon said. "He knew what he wanted our [Kennesaw] defense to look like. He found the players who could make plays. He found ways to expose and dissect an offense."
 
"When I first met Brian interviewing for the job at Kennesaw, I thought he was an interesting, out-of-the-box thinker and incredibly easy to talk to," Volker says.
 
"His [defensive] system is fun to coach and fun to play in. It's calculated, aggressive and violent, but also intelligent," adds Volker, who says Newberry finds coaching inspiration from coaches on every level. "The secret is finding what our guys can do to execute at a high level. We want to be difficult to prepare for. We want to be chaotic and unpredictable and create confusion."
 
"Quarterbacks are so good nowadays at identifying defenses. You've got to affect the quarterback and the offensive line," Newberry says. "You've got to make things happen on defense, especially when you are less talented. You have to take risks. I'd rather go down swinging. If you sit back on your heels on defense, you're going to get torched. Like [Hall of Fame NFL coach] Bill Parcells has said, 'Apply pressure, don't feel it.'"
 
Navy senior defensive end Jacob Busic, a third-year starter and a major piece on a defense that has been Navy's strength through a tough three seasons, remembers becoming a huge fan of Newberry, before the two had met. From his room at the Naval Academy prep school in Newport, R.I. in 2019, Busic was fascinated and energized viewing Newberry's unit.
 
"Watching that defense flying around, I could not wait to get to Navy as a freshman and go through plebe summer. I was so excited to get into that [defensive] system," says Busic, who adds that Newberry was the slam-dunk choice among players to replace Niumatalolo.
 
"We love the way [Newberry] took over – super calm and collected, handling things extremely smoothly, getting involved on both sides of the ball and special teams. We wanted a guy who knew the Naval Academy and could put us on the right track again and we thought Coach Newberry was that guy."
 
The way senior defensive back Eavan Gibbons sees things, Newberry brings the entire package to his new job title. He looks and acts the part, seemingly without trying. He has proven he is an excellent teacher and motivator. He looks you in the eye and speaks in that calm, southwest drawl that is a product of growing up near Oklahoma City in the south suburb of Moore.
 
"[Newberry] doesn't have a booming voice, but you're always listening when he talks football or life or the academy," Gibbons says. "He's got his hair always cut right, got his beard well-trimmed, got the outfit looking good. He's just well put together."
 
"[As a defensive mind] Coach Newberry is kind of the mad scientist, extremely detail-oriented, creating a scheme that confuses offensive reads and helps us to put on pressure," Gibbons adds. "He brings guys [on blitzes] from all kinds of directions. He teaches a combination of scheme, effort and execution."
 
Co-captain Lirion Murtezi, Navy's senior interior lineman, says Newberry has adapted to his head coaching role seamlessly, from the way he delivers his daily message to the team, to the time he spends in offensive and defensive meetings and delivers praise and constructive criticism.
 
"It's always a non-biased view," Murtezi says. "[Newberry] is a real honest coach who tells us to our faces what to fix. He's always in offensive meetings, giving his perspective. And he is on us when we mess up."
 
"Brian loves people and he is always interested in them," says Steve Newberry, Brian's father. "Back in grade school, he gravitated to people maybe nobody else was interested in. He always liked to hear older folks tell stories. And there is no doubt he was a free spirit."
 
Newberry appreciates how his coaching journey has led him to a great place in Annapolis, although the trip has been unconventional, starting with the beginning.
 
As a 1998 graduate of Baylor, where an achilles injury cost him nearly two years of football recovery time, he chose to delay seeking a graduate assistant coaching job.
 
He ended up becoming, of all things, a tour guide at Glacier National Park in Montana. What followed was six months of bliss, as Newberry learned how to fly fish, played a ton of chess and got interested in landscape photography, after meeting a former photographer for National Geographic magazine.
 
Before long, he was becoming quite skilled at both pastimes. They remain passionate hobbies to this day.
 
"I just wanted to do something different, be around different people and see a new part of the world. I also wanted to see how much I really wanted to get into coaching," Newberry says. "I didn't watch TV for the six months I was [in Montana}. It was awesome for an Oklahoma guy who had never really been anywhere."
 
He eventually landed as a graduate assistant coach at Southern Arkansas in 1999 and spent two seasons coaching defensive backs and wide receivers. He moved on to his first of two stints at Washington & Lee in 2001-02.
 
In between those two coaching stops, Newberry spent a summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he nearly got a job at a fly fishing outfit, while he was working as a baker in a bagel shop. Newberry still wonders if, had he gotten that fly fishing job, he never would have left.
 
Newberry then spent the 2003 season coaching defensive backs at Lehigh and the spring of 2004 as a grad assistant/defensive line coach at Rice. Then he was back to Washington & Lee for the next three seasons, as defensive coordinator. The Generals' defense produced a school-record 43 sacks in '04, led the Old Dominion Athletic Conference in '05 in scoring, rushing and pass defense and in '06, ranked among the nation's pass defense leaders and forced 30 turnovers.
 
He followed that with four seasons at Elon, where he coached defensive backs. Then, Newberry found himself unemployed for nearly six months, before catching on for a year as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach at University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. He then spent the following season as defensive coordinator at Northern Michigan, before he interviewed for the same job at Kennesaw State.
 
Bohannon said he interviewed two potential defensive coordinators, and he followed his gut feeling by hiring Newberry. Bohannon recalls a recruiting trip he and Newberry took into North Carolina. While driving back to Georgia, Bohannon was on the phone for about two hours dealing with some discipline issues concerning members of his team.
 
"Brian looked at me at one point in the car and said, 'I don't think I ever want to do that,'" recalls Bohannon with a laugh. "Being a head coach has its moments. I don't know that anybody is really ready for it. You get thrown in the fire and you're making decisions all day long. The learning never stops. But Brian is a smart guy. He's got a plan. He's already proved that."
 
"I really believe everything happens for a reason," Newberry says. "Sometimes we don't understand it. But if you look back with a birds-eye view, you see that you thought you were ready for some things you were not. Sometimes you've got to take a step backward before you go forward. You learn about environments you don't want to foster, you see the ways you don't want to run things."
 
"I've always had other interests outside of football," he adds. "There were probably eight to ten years when I loved what I was doing. But there were questions. Is there something else out there? Am I doing the right thing? If I hadn't had all of those experiences, I would not be ready for this. And I've got one of the best jobs in the country."