Fran Brown on people questioning path to head coach: 'That didn't happen with Dabo Swinney'

Fran Brown knows there’s a standard path to becoming a head coach. The Syracuse leader would naturally go from position coach to coordinator and then to head coach.

Well, the former Rutgers and Georgia assistant skipped the coordinator part. In fact, it was never part of his plan when he outlined his coaching goals.

He also questioned why ask him about that when guys like Dabo Swinney and Urban Meyer became elite head coaches without being coordinators.

“I always knew this, I didn’t want to be a coordinator, I never thought about being a coordinator,” Brown said on College Sports Radio on Sirius XM. “When I would tell people that, you know, everybody else would tell me that well, you’re gonna probably have to do this. No, I’m not, you know, it’s just not what I want to do. It is not how it goes. I believe in the man above and when you truly do things the right way and you put all your trust that and put everything into God, there’s unbelievable faith that you just know what’s going to happen.”

Technically, Swinney was the interim OC before becoming head coach at Clemson, but it was never permanent.

“I thought it was going to happen before and it didn’t and there was a reason he didn’t want me to have it, because I probably wasn’t ready,” Brown said. “Now I’m in a better time and a better situation. I think the situation is the right situation. So, you know, I just think that it’s a time and place for everything, but I never ever ever wanted to be a coordinator. 

“I always knew I wasn’t going to have to be even when other people would try to tell me and kind of sometimes it made me upset because it’s like, are you trying to tell me what my path will be?”

That’s when he mentioned legendary coaches in the game who paid their dues but didn’t have to be a coordinator. It seems there’s a question of skill level as a coach if you don’t climb each rung of the ladder.
Brown wasn’t having any of that.

“That didn’t happen with Dabo Swinney, that didn’t happen with Urban Meyer, that didn’t happen with Jim Tressel,” Brown said. “Look at different names and different guys who are some of the best … There are some really, really good coaches, you know, some of the best names that weren’t coordinators, so just kind of wanted to follow up.”