Where Are They Now: Dan Brown

A free agent in 2019, Daniel Brown’s previous stop in Chicago led to New York becoming the leading prospective place for where he’d land next.

Entering his fifth season in the league after playing for Baltimore and the Bears, the tight end was familiar with a few of the Jets’ coaches who had joined first-year head coach Adam Gase’s staff, which helped steer him to signing with the Green & White.

“My last year in Chicago, I didn’t quite play as much offensively as I would hope for,” Brown said. “I was kind of looking for a fresh start somewhere else and had a mutual connection with the Jets’ offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains, who was my offensive coordinator in Chicago when I got there in 2016, and I played a lot under him.

“So I was familiar with that offense and I had learned quickly that if you’re not a first- or a second-string guy, you’re really only going to survive in this league by playing special teams. And I took it very seriously. Obviously, I had a receiving background and also a special teams background and the ability to play multiple positions, so that’s what they expected of me when I signed.”

Playing in every game with five starts during his first season with the Jets, Brown was on the field for nearly 30 percent of the offensive snaps and almost 70 percent of the special teams plays, and contributed with six tackles and seven catches for 72 yards and a touchdown.

“We started off really slow that year and ended up winning a bunch of games in the second half,” Anderson said. “But that Washington week where I scored a (20-yard) touchdown, the first touchdown of the game, and then Ryan Griffin had a big day that day (with five catches for 109 yards and a touchdown), that’s probably one of my fondest memories.”

Leading the Jets with 335 special teams snaps the following year, and doing so again in 2021, that season became a memorable as well as a surprising one for Brown, when after playing in the first…