Tennessee hosted a handful of highly-ranked prospects from the 2023 class during its junior day this past weekend, but the Vols had one of the nation’s top 2024 players on campus, too.
Sammy Brown, the No. 1-ranked linebacker for the 2024 class by 247Sports, visited Tennessee for the third time since getting an offer from the Vols before the end of his freshman year. The latest visit allowed Brown the chance to talk football with Tennessee’s staff and again experience the “culture” the Vols have that’s standing out to him.
The 6-foot-2, 215-pound Brown, a running back and linebacker at Jefferson High School in Georgia who is currently the No. 5 overall player in the 2024 class according to 247Sports, first visited Tennessee last June when he impressed at one of the Vols’ camps, and he returned to Knoxville in October for Tennessee’s game against Ole Miss.
Brown lives roughly 30 minutes from Athens and has Georgia, Clemson and several other top programs after him already, but he has connections to Tennessee, too, with his mother a Johnson City native and his grandparents still living there and he’s gotten familiar with the Vols and head coach
Josh Heupel and his staff from his times on campus.
“I really like the culture that Tennessee has,” Brown said. “They’ve got a really great thing going and they’ve improved so much over this year and last year. I really like the culture they have, the way the coaches are building players, not only as players on the field, but off the field they’re going to be great men, great players, and I really like what they’re doing with their program.”
Brown is a multi-sport athlete whose physicality and speed attracted the interest of several big-time college programs early during his high school career. He won the Georgia Class 4A 220-pound state wrestling title last month and last year as a freshman he won the 400-meter state track title with a time of 50.50 seconds. Brown also clocked impressive times in the 100 (10.92 seconds) and 200 (22.55 seconds) and recorded a 21-foot, 1-inch long jump.
Having been to Tennessee for a camp and for a game, his latest visit to Tennessee for junior day was more about “actually being able to sit down and talk football” with the Vols’ coaching staff.
Tennessee’s coaches told Brown they liked his combination of size and physicality in addition to his character.
“It was really fun to get with the coaches and be able to talk football,” Brown said, “not only my game of football but their game of football and kind of how they link together. It was good to see all the similarities between high school football and college football, the way defense is run, offense is run. It was good to really sit down with the coaches and talk.”
He added: “I really learned our defense that we run at Jefferson is really similar to what they run here, so I would probably play Mike, Will — inside ‘backer. It was really good to sit down and talk with them.”
Brown said the only future visit he currently has confirmed is to Oklahoma the first week of April. He said there are a couple of other schools he’d like to see this spring and mentioned Notre Dame specifically. He also visited Georgia in January.
Still not to the halfway point of his high school career, Brown is still very much in the exploratory phase of his recruitment.
“I want to make a decision sometime during my senior year,” he said. “I’ve still got a lot of time left, so I really want to make that sometime during my senior year and kind of give myself time to evaluate and see everything and make sure that I really confirm my decision.”
When he takes those visits, Brown is looking for a lot of what he saw at Tennessee.
“It’s like I talked about with Tennessee today,” he said. “It’s just a really great culture, coaches that are going to be able to help me become a better player on the field, but off the field, too, are going to help me become a better husband, a better friend, a better CEO one day, coaches and culture that’s going to help my after football.”