According to FootballScoop.com, Notre Dame is set to hire former Tennessee recruiting coordinator Dre Brown. Brown just joined the staff in Knoxville in February but will be relocating to South Bend a couple months before the college football season kicks off.
The report states Brown will work for Notre Dame in an offensive analyst/recruiting-centric role.
Brown doesn’t have much experience in college coaching. He was playing the game himself as recently as 2019, when he was a senior running back at Illinois. Brown ran for 902 yards and seven touchdowns in his career with the Illini.
In an interview with Shaw Media earlier this year, Brown told the local outlet he was working at a bank in Champaign while finishing his master’s degree one week and was in the football facilities at Tennessee the next week serving as new Volunteers head coach Josh Heupel’s director of recruiting.
A relationship Brown had with Tennessee offensive coordinator Alex Golesh helped Brown break into the coaching profession. Golesh was an assistant coach at Illinois during Brown’s freshman year there.
It’s safe to say he didn’t see himself going from one of college football’s most recognizable brands to another in the span of a few months.
“I’m really not too sure of my goal right now,” Brown told Shaw Media’s Eddie Carifio in February. “I’m just going to work as hard as I can, network a lot. That’s super important in this profession. I’ll see how things are in the SEC. If that leads to coaching, if that leads me to the head of recruiting somewhere someday, that’s what I’ll look at the most.
“But I’m meeting a lot of super-cool people around here.”
It seems that Brown's role will be similar to what Chad Bowden has been doing for the Irish on the defensive side of the ball. Bowden’s title is defensive recruiting director and helps aid operations and has daily contact with targets on that side of the ball.
Brown was a recruit back in the 2015 class and is coming up on his 24th birthday later this month. He picked the Illini over Indiana, Oregon State, Toledo and others. Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in recreation, sport and tourism in December 2018.
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