Brad Brownell doesn’t plan on leaving his job anytime soon.
At least not on his own terms.
Fresh off his 12th season as Clemson’s men’s basketball coach, whether or not Brownell’s tenure with the Tigers has been a successful one is subjective. On one hand, Brownell has won more than 60% of his games and has led the Tigers to their three most recent NCAA Tournament appearances. On the other, three trips to the NIT are the only other postseason appearances Clemson has made under his direction.
Athletic director Graham Neff was quick to express his disappointment in the Tigers’ latest omission from the Big Dance after a season in which Clemson finished just one game above .500, making expectations clear for next season and beyond. But Brownell still largely enjoys coaching and would like to keep doing it at Clemson for years to come.
It doesn’t hurt that Brownell’s gig comes with a cushy $2.6 million salary, which is set to increase to $3 million by the end of his contract in 2026.
“We all get paid way more money than we should,” Brownell said.
But at a time when the landscape of college athletics is rapidly changing, the need to win now as well as the time commitment required to try to get that done are also ratcheting up in a coaching profession that’s already synonymous with long hours and immense pressure.
Between the transfer portal and name, image and likeness opportunities that could potentially dictate where athletes choose to go to school, recruiting is in overdrive while roster management has simultaneously become a headache for coaches. Last month during the ACC’s annual spring meetings, where topics such as scheduling would normally dominate talks, Brownell said the portal — specially whether there should be more condensed windows on the recruiting calendar for transfers to enter it — was the primary topic of conversation among basketball coaches. Of course, there was discussion about potential NIL regulation, too.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Clemson Insider last month, Brownell said he feels like, now more than ever, there’s always something to monitor when it comes to running his program.
“A little bit, it does (feel that way),” Brownell said. “And then I think the other thing is you’re always concerned because we want stability and we want to know how to prepare for the next season and how to plan. As the CEO of your organization, you’re trying to plan. That becomes much more challenging with all the things that you’re managing and the factors that are in play. Obviously it keeps you on edge and makes it a lot more challenging.”
Some coaches have had enough.
At just 45 years old, Matt Luke, the former head football coach at Ole Miss and most recently an assistant at Georgia, recently stepped away from his $900,000 salary as Kirby Smart’s smart associate head coach and offensive line coach, citing a desire to spend more time with his family. Bronco Mendenhall, after spending more than three decades in the profession, did the same when he abruptly resigned as Virginia’s football coach after last season at just 55 years old.
“There was a sense of clarity to me that I needed to step back from college football and reassess, renew, reframe and reinvent, with my wife as a partner, our future and the next chapter of our lives,” Mendenhall told reporters at the time.
Though that’s not a decision Brownell is ready to make, he is a 53-year-old husband to his wife, Paula, and father of two college-aged daughters, Abby and Kate, so he understands. For him, though, the concern that comes with coaching amid college sports’ current climate goes beyond the grind. While Brownell is in favor of athletes reaping the financial benefits of NIL opportunities, he’s afraid college sports may be becoming more individualized as a result.
“When you get into this, it’s so much just about building a team and the camaraderie of team,” Brownell said. “That spirit and watching guys grow, develop them as players and people and teaching some life lessons along the way. And then the competitive spirit of trying to win against somebody else. Bringing this group together and all these different folks from different places different races, different beliefs and different socioeconomic backgrounds and trying to put everybody together and develop a group that cares about one another and fights for something. That’s what’s fun.
“I think the whole team, we’re losing that. And that worries me. Are we doing people right? Are we helping build young men the way we need to? Dealing with adversity. We talk about grit. Are we teaching grit? Are we fostering teamwork and concern and care for others and sacrifice and things you do because you want to be a part of something bigger than yourself, a team? Losing that identity and losing that sense, I don’t know. That’s hard on me. That’s probably a little bit more old school, but that’s what I love about coaching. That and competition. So I feel like we’re losing some of that.”
Has it all made Brownell ponder how much longer he wants to stay involved in the only profession he’s known since his days as a young assistant at Evansville in the early 1990s?
“You always do,” said Brownell, who, counting his stops at Clemson, Wright State and UNC Wilmington, has been a head coach since 2002. “You get frustrated at times, and some of the things are out of your control. And that makes it much more challenging. I’m not good at anything, and some people don’t think I’m good at coaching. I certainly love it, but I think we all as coaches give pause. And I think that’s why you’re starting to see more and more coaches think about it. It’s hard to be a coach now, too. You’re under a lot of scrutiny.
“But, man, it’s still a wonderful profession. Unbelievable rewards working with young people and watching them grow and get better and really develop. You really enjoy that.”
Brownell said this past season served as a reminder of that for him. Clemson, which flirted with a losing record deep into the regular season, played a chunk of its ACC slate without veteran forward Hunter Tyson (broken clavicle) while leading scorer PJ Hall played with a stress fracture in his foot that slowed him down at times, but the Tigers won five straight games at the end of the season before Virginia Tech’s buzzer-beater kept them from advancing to the ACC Tournament quarterfinals.
“We didn’t achieve as much as we would’ve liked, but our team dealt with a lot of injuries and adversity,” Brownell said. “And by the end of the year, we really were doing some good things. I wish we had been healthy, but that was fun, to take a group of guys that were different and try to build an identity together.”
