CHARLOTTE — After the disaster of a 2025 season, the goal for the offseason at Clemson was a major reset.

The Tigers came into last season ranked inside the Top 5 and with College Football Playoff aspirations. However, the season quickly went off the rails, as the team dropped three of its first four games. A late-season rally did see Clemson win four of its final five games to finish with a winning record at 7-6, but that final loss was an ugly one, as the Tigers looked rather listless in falling to Penn State in the Pinstripe Bowl to close out the campaign.

Conventional wisdom suggests that everything about last season just needs flushing, and while veteran linebacker generally agrees with that sentiment, he’s not quite ready to totally forget. He fully believes there are lessons to be learned from what went wrong that can be applied to getting it right in 2026.

“First off, going from last year to this year, I think the biggest thing is that you want to put that in the past,” Brown said during the ACC Kickoff. “I don’t think you want to dwell on that, but at the same time, you don’t want to completely forget it because there are many aspects of not only the game of football, but the game of life that you can learn from a season like that last year. How to overcome adversity, how to be a man and face adversity and be able to overcome it. There are a lot of lessons you can learn from last year.”

One lesson appears to have already been learned — the program needed a reset in many areas. Part of that included Dabo Swinney making some changes to his coaching staff, which included bringing Chad Morris back to run the offense. The defense was also retooled, with some major portal additions on that side of the ball.

However, those were just the first steps.

“We really are focusing this offseason on resetting and resetting our goals, resetting our standards and learning from last year,” Brown added. “But this is a new season. This is a new team.”

Whether or not this reset is successful is yet to be determined. Right now, there is one absolute. This Clemson team isn’t coming into the season with the kind of hype last year’s team did. Very few, if any, are predicting the Tigers to even compete for an ACC Championship, much less a spot in the playoff. That means this team is going to come in flying under the radar.

It won’t take long to know how well this reset will work, though, seeing as Clemson opens in Baton Rouge under the lights against LSU on September 5 when Lane Kiffin makes his debut as the head coach of the Bayou Bengals.

“Then for the first game, it is a big game, and there’s a lot of headlines around it, but at the end of the day, that football game is going to be the exact same football game that you’re going to play Week 7,” said Brown. “For me, there’s not going to be any different kind of preparation or anything like that that will go into the game. I’m still going to come in on Monday and really watch tape for two or three hours. Throughout the week, my preparation will be exactly the same.”