Sammy Brown led Clemson’s linebackers in tackles last season with 99 of them, and heading into his third fall camp, he’s finally doing something he’s never done as a Tiger: building on the same defense instead of learning a new one. That continuity, more than any single addition up front, is what he points to as the difference in this year’s group.
Brown arrived at Clemson early enough to start as a true freshman, which meant year one was spent absorbing a new scheme on the fly. Year two brought another install under a new staff. This fall marks the first time he’s stepped onto Jervey Meadows already fluent in the defense being taught, and he says that shift shows up in two specific ways: confidence and competitiveness. The confidence comes from reps, from knowing the calls well enough that he trusts the player at will linebacker next to him and the player at rover behind him to be in the right spot. The competitiveness, he says, is spread through the entire room, not just among the starters. Backups pushing starters is what raises the level of everybody on the depth chart, in his words, and that dynamic has been the story of Clemson’s front seven through the first stretch of camp.
That kind of anticipatory, see-it-before-it-happens instinct is something Brown has actively studied. He’s pointed to newly inducted Hall of Famer Luke Kuechly as a model, specifically Kuechly’s habit of calling out plays before the snap. For Brown, that’s the next level of playing linebacker: reacting less and anticipating more, turning film study into plays other defenders simply can’t make. Not many college linebackers think that far ahead.
Leadership is the other half of Brown’s fall. With veteran voices like Wade gone from the room, Brown has had to grow into being the guy who gets teammates fired up before kickoff, a role that didn’t exist for him a year ago. He’s been intentional about it, working on being a vocal presence since spring, but he’s also been clear that the title doesn’t excuse him from the daily grind. He still has to show up and earn his spot, he says, because the room behind him is loaded with talent pushing for time, including younger linebackers who are putting in the same work he is.
That message tracks with what Clemson recently recognized in Brown off the field. His preseason nod to the Bronko Nagurski Trophy watch list is national confirmation of what teammates have been saying about him inside the building for months.
But it doesn’t stop with Brown. The same chemistry shows up unprompted from a defensive tackle who’s been at Clemson a matter of weeks. Andy Burburija, a junior college transfer who helped Iowa Western win a national championship last season, has been blunt that nothing in his previous stops compares to what he’s found working alongside the linebackers. He describes a level of closeness and coordination between the D-tackles and linebackers that he never experienced in junior college football, singling out that group as the one that has caught him off guard the most since arriving on campus. Within that room, Burburija namechecks Will Heldt and Brown specifically as players who’ve stood out to him, and he extends the same praise beyond the front seven to cornerback Ashton Hampton on the back end.
That praise carries extra weight because Burburija has nothing invested in the story. He transferred in from a completely different level of the sport, where he says players didn’t have access to the same resources, the same coordination between position groups, or the same sense of family. Watching the linebackers and defensive tackles operate together this fall, by his account, has been one of the clearest signs that the culture Clemson is building is real rather than manufactured for the cameras.
Some of that culture shows up away from the field entirely. Burburija described a lake day with teammates where head coach Dabo Swinney was seen jumping off rocks alongside players, the kind of shared, low-stakes memory that doesn’t move a depth chart but does explain why a room full of new faces and returning starters has come together as quickly as it has. It’s the connective tissue between practice reps and Saturday trust.
None of it changes the fact that outside expectations have shifted elsewhere this preseason. Miami, SMU, Georgia, LSU and Ohio State are the programs dominating the conversation nationally, and Clemson’s front seven is fine with that. Brown’s own description of the group’s mentality is to live inside out, worrying about what happens inside the building rather than what’s being said about the team publicly. That mindset will be tested immediately when Clemson opens the season against LSU, the first real measure of whether the chemistry this group has built in fall camp translates onto the field.
