Syracuse's future is already bright under rising star Fran Brown
He's more than a shot in the dark—the Orange have landed one of the most exciting, dedicated coaches in college football.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
In February 1983, a few months before Dino Babers embarked on the final season of his career as a college football player at Hawaii1, Fran Brown was born to a 13-year-old woman in New Jersey.
The comparison between Syracuse’s last football coach, fired near the end of 2023, and its next, hired just over a week later, is a fascinating one. In many ways, they couldn’t be more different. Babers grew up in the westernmost reaches of the United States, enjoyed a fairly stable family situation, and coached for nearly three decades before easing into his first job as an HC. Brown lived over on the East Coast, was raised by a young mother and a largely absent father, and has gone from high school assistant to P4 coach in just fourteen years.
Yet at the same time, the two have a lot in common. They both moved around a lot in their youth—Babers was the son of a chief petty officer first class in the Navy, while Brown’s family lived under the constant threat of eviction and homelessness. They’re also the first two Black coaches in Syracuse football history, a status which remains rare in D1 coaching circles, despite the absurd demographic disconnect with the student-athletes these HCs oversee. Black players reliably make up a plurality, and nearly a majority, of D1 rosters, yet Black coaches’ numbers have been stagnant at just 40 or so of the approximately 250 available jobs2.
It’s nice that the end of Babers’ tenure hasn’t resulted in a further drop in that number, though the fact that Syracuse hired him and Brown in their last two coaching cycles is, on some level, necessarily tied to people of color remaining outliers in high-level HC roles. This is one of the tougher jobs in the power ranks: a place where it’s difficult to recruit, where basketball (men’s and women’s) demands attention year in and year out, and where historical success has been largely limited to the 1990s. There’s a rather transparent need for Syracuse to zig when others zag, and that’s part of why Brown is here. A 41-year-old Black man with practically no experience as a coordinator and none as a head coach doesn’t tick a lot of boxes that other P4 teams would require, but the Orange can’t and shouldn’t limit themselves like that.
It’s easy to be cynical about Syracuse’s reasons for bucking the trend in so many ways, because…well, yeah, college football is a business and they’re in a position where they need to offer something distinct to avoid competing with stronger programs so directly. But that’s not to say they’re not particularly optimistic about Brown. There’s a belief that he can recruit well and win here, not just because he standouts from the endless glut of 60-something white coaches rotating through most staffs, but also because he’s just a damn good football coach. You don’t go from Temple Director of Internal Operations to DBs coach at Kirby Smart’s Georgia in eleven years without impressing just about everyone around you, and it seems obvious Brown would’ve landed a power-conference HC job within the decade. There’s an important distinction between breaking convention just for the sake of being different and getting ahead of the curve on a guy everyone agrees has a bright future, and the Orange have clearly done the latter here.
So far—albeit without a game coached on the field, which is a test you can never really be sure about until it happens—the bet is paying off massively. Syracuse is currently 36th nationally for the 2024 recruiting season, per 247Sports, and they stand 22nd in the transfer portal near the end of that cycle. Both are massive departures from where they were last year (73rd and 62nd, respectively), and the latter would be their highest such rank in the transfer era. That’s pretty good going for a program mired in six-win territory for the last few years, and just a few months removed from a coaching transition!
There are plenty of reasons you could come up with for why Brown has rapidly made Syracuse such an attractive destination. Certainly, standing out as a person who can speak to his players’ experiences better than many direct recruiting rivals is a valuable factor; so is his résumé, which may be short, but is also inarguably impressive. Student-athletes are invariably eager to play for recent Georgia staff members, and for good reason—Smart knows how to put players in the NFL better than anybody currently in the sport, and assistants like Brown take much of that expertise to their new roles. There’s a lot about this guy to like just from a glance at his Wikipedia page, and the Orange certainly deserve some credit for setting themselves apart so effectively.
Ultimately, though, Brown’s rapid success is, more than anything, a result of who he is as a person. His introductory press conference set a tone for his tenure which has evidently carried through to the recruiting trail—he knows this isn’t a job where you can win with nothing but positive platitudes and naïve self-assurance. It takes practical, actionable effort to make a program as embattled as Syracuse football relevant, and to keep it that way long-term. Being forthright about what he needs from the community, staff, and school, and what they’re going to get from him, has done a great deal to establish Brown as a genuine, committed coach who means it when he says:
“You’re going to get my heart. You’re going to get every bit of me that you can get for the entire time I’m here.”
Fran Brown, introductory press conference at Syracuse
It’s easy to believe that, seeing how much work he’s put in already, and easy to get excited about joining or supporting a team that has so much potential with the right support. This is only the start, and Syracuse is still a long way from being a consistent contender with serious talent to back it up, but if there’s anyone who can find a way to win at a program that’s needed this level of buy-in and enthusiasm for a long time, it’s Fran Brown.
The Last Five Years
I don’t have any strong feelings on how Babers’ tenure here ended—mostly, I just think it was really funny. How many coaches take over a 4-8 team, lead it to the AP top 15 within three seasons, bottom out at 1-10 two years later, then get all the way back to the top 15 two years after that before going out on a 6-12 skid? The first half of that 2022 season remains a bizarre outlier in the Orange’s otherwise-uninspiring final three years under Babers, but they did correctly identify it as such when making the decision to move on last season. This wasn’t going anywhere, and bringing in fresh blood with a young, inspiring coach was a good call.
Syracuse has excellent returns—tenth overall, and ninth on offense with a whopping 81% of their production back—in part thanks to that influx of talent from the portal, which could help them get into the upper echelon of the ACC in a hurry. The big-ticket addition is Ohio State transfer Kyle McCord, who was unspectacular in the Buckeyes’ biggest games last season, but still set a solid baseline en route to a very strong season-long line (9.1 Y/A, 24 TD, 6 INT); there’s no stronger evidence that Brown is already doing remarkable things at this program. The most pressing concerns right now lie in his receiving corps, as Damien Alford was dismissed from the roster in February and Donovan Brown was reported as “not with the team” during spring practice, seemingly for off-field reasons. If Syracuse can settle questions there and along the line, both places they have plenty of talent to work with, the offense alone could guide them back to the top 25 in Brown’s first season at the helm.
The Next Five Years
Given that the driving mantra of this series is taking an optimistic approach to almost every move, no matter how boring or seemingly unfitting, I’m well aware that it can be hard to tell how much I like a given hire. Of course, that’s partially because I’m a firm believer that almost any new coach can succeed beyond all expectation and can fail disastrously, and it’s more interesting to look at the positives that sold a program on their pick than the negatives that could lead to disappointment. But, yes, there are inevitably some choices I don’t find all that inspired, and others I’m eager to see in action.
Researching and writing up one of these pieces tends to push its subject at least a little towards the latter category, and it’s raised my opinion of Brown as much as anyone. He does have the bona fides to take over a top-level job just from a glance at what he’s done, even if jumping straight from assistant P4 coach to head P4 coach is a considerable leap. But paying closer attention, getting a good read on who he is and how he’s already making moves at Syracuse, makes it obvious that this hire is already paying dividends.
Of course, there are still unknowns. It’s the offseason yet, and coaches who haven’t held a top job before are always due for some scrutiny when it comes to their ability to gameplan and adjust on the field. There’s no guarantee that this hire will work out just yet, as is the case for any new hire, and it’s important not to take these signs of hope for more than what they are. Then again, there’s no need to—no matter the admitted uncertainty that comes with any first-time head coach, the potential and promise Fran Brown has already created at Syracuse is undoubtedly worth getting excited about.
Hawaiʻi incorporated the okina in their branding later, in the 1990s.
These data are drawn from the NCAA Demographics Database, covering 2012-23.