Before Watson and Mack Brown were college football coaches, they were high school icons in Tennessee

Watson and Mack Brown were always together growing up in Putnam County, playing sports from early August on the football field through the winter on the basketball court and the spring and summer on the baseball field.

The brothers were on the same team no matter the sport from little league until their time together at Vanderbilt. They didn't realize it at the time, but the bond they shared set in motion the profound success both would go on to enjoy throughout their lives.

By the time they were in high school, the Browns were not only two of the best athletes at Cookeville High, they were two of the best football players in Tennessee.

That was from 1966 through 1968. Not many players had come from the state before who were better than the Browns, and not many came after. It's why The Tennessean placed the brothers on its 1960s All-Decade Team, the first installment of a project by the newspaper to highlight the best high school football players from the 1960s through the 2010s.

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"We were pretty much like twins," said Mack Brown, the North Carolina coach who won a BCS national championship at Texas, with former Tennessee Titans star Vince Young as his quarterback. "We would play every sport every day. We'd go home, we had a basketball goal out back and we would shoot every day before we'd go to bed. We played every sport at (Cookeville). We went to every camp together. Everything we did we did together and we didn't even think about it."

They may have spent most of their time together, but they were not the same type of player. Watson was a high-profile all-state quarterback who threw for 1,889 yards and rushed for 1,038 yards as a senior. Mack was a hard-nosed running back and defensive player who handled the grunt work.

"The chemistry for us was Watson was the high-profile prima donna and I was the guy that had to work," Mack Brown said with a smile.

Mack also was an all-state player and Watson's favorite receiver. Mack was the only player to make the 1966 and 1967 Tennessean All-Midstate first teams.

Watson and Mack were not the first in their family to establish themselves as Cookeville greats. Their grandfather Eddie "Jelly" Watson organized and coached the first football team at Cookeville from 1928-32 and then from 1944-58. He also coached at Clay County and won more than 100 games in his career.

Their father Melvin Brown was also an outstanding high school football player at Clay County and then at Tennessee Tech. He became a high school coach and then an administrator.

"I was around it all the time; my granddaddy was the high school coach at Cookeville so from a young age I'm on the buses going to games. I'm doing all of that," Watson Brown said. "Mack and I both were always around sports. It was inbred in us and it was really all we did."

Watson went on to be Vanderbilt's starting quarterback and Mack began his career as a running back with the Commodores. After Watson was injured, Mack transferred to Florida State.

After college, the Browns were finally set to go their separate ways. Watson planned to be a sports writer, and Mack wanted to be an attorney.

"Watson went to Vanderbilt to be (Nashville Banner sports editor) Fred Russell; he wanted to be a writer," Mack said. "And I went to Vanderbilt because I wanted to be a lawyer. As soon as we realized I didn't read well enough to be a lawyer and when I realized I had to read every case every day and go to school two or three more years, I said, 'I'm not doing that.'"

Watson, who had been named the Sports Illustrated and SEC player of the week after leading Vanderbilt to a win over No. 13-ranked Alabama, was simply too great of an athlete to stick to a career in journalism. He also played baseball at Vanderbilt and was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates as a shortstop.

His shoulder injury cut short his baseball career, and it wasn't long before the Browns found themselves back together following in their father and grandfather's footsteps, embarking on football coaching careers.

Watson got his first head coaching job at Austin Peay in 1979 before returning to Vanderbilt as a offensive coordinator two years later. He was a later a head coach at Cincinnati and Rice before returning again to Vanderbilt as the head coach. He later coached at UAB and Tennessee Tech before retiring in 2015.

Mack began his career as receivers coach at Southern Miss and got his first head coaching job at Appalachian State in 1983. After one year as offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, he became the head coach at Tulane (1985-87), North Carolina (1988-97) and Texas (1998-2013) before returning in 2019 to North Carolina, where he is still the coach. He led Texas to the 2005 national championship and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2018.

Reach Mike Organ at 615-259-8021 or on Twitter @MikeOrganWriter.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Mack and Watson Brown were Nashville area football stars before coaching