ASHLAND – Berk Brown has made the Southern Oregon football team a contender again, and on Tuesday the American Football Coaches Association made him the NAIA Region 5 co-Coach of the Year.

Brown, whose Raiders went 8-3 in his second season as head coach, shared the honor with Jarrail Jackson of Texas College. The award was voted on by fellow coaches who are active members of the AFCA.

SOU came up one win short of a spot in the national playoffs, its season ending with a 27-24 overtime loss on Saturday at College of Idaho. But the Raiders still posted their highest win total in seven years, landed a No. 22 final ranking and continued an upward trend that began when Brown took over the program.

In 2023, Brown's first season, the Raiders were picked to finish seventh in the Frontier Conference but ended up fourth in the standings with their first winning record since 2018.

His second campaign saw them start 4-0, a run punctuated by consecutive top-10 upsets of College of Idaho and Montana Western. They went undefeated in six games at Raider Stadium, ranked 10th nationally in points and 11th in takeaways, and produced the NAIA's top rusher in Gunner Yates.

The Raiders' three losses were all on the road, by a combined margin of 14 points. They finished with a higher ranking than all but four teams that, like them, were omitted from the preseason NAIA Top 25.

Brown, an SOU alum, was the team's defensive coordinator when it won the NAIA championship in 2014 and returned to the title game a year later. Before returning to the Raiders, he was the head coach at Crater High.