Greg McElroy grades Fran Brown's debut season at Syracuse

Greg McElroy thinks Syracuse’s Fran Brown did about as good of a job as any first-year head coach in the country last season.

McElroy said Brown aced his first season with the Orange last week during ‘Always College Football’.

“Year-one grade? A+. No doubt about it for Fran Brown,” said McElroy.

Much of that has to do with where Brown started in his first-ever job as a head coach. He took over a much-desired job with no prior experience but did use what he had done in the past to field a team, namely with eighteen transfers for a top-ten class, that would go on to win double-digit games for just the third time in the 2000s.

“Syracuse went and hired Fran Brown last year and it wasn’t a massive surprise. There were a lot of very interested coaches that looked at Syracuse and thought, ‘Alright, I can win here’. It was actually a highly-coveted job when Dino Babers was let go,” McElroy recalled. “When they got Brown, it was a little bit surprising because it wasn’t a lot of head coaching experience. There was a lot of sitting head coaches that were going after this job. So to go and get a guy that really was known more for his recruiting prowess than being a guy that was excellent from a coaching standpoint is something that I don’t think anybody really knew. It was a bit of a dice roll and it worked out great.”

“Even though he had never been a coordinator, even though he’d never been a head coach, he had done a great job in making sure that he could upgrade the talent on the roster and he did so immediately…I mean, he went out and he upgraded their situation at some premier positions,” continued McElroy. “While he lost guys in numbers, he upgraded in quality. It was a great, great job there in the first month and change of his tenure to go out and make sure that the roster overall had more top-to-bottom talent. Then you kind of carry some of the momentum created on the recruiting trail onto the year one record of 10-3. Pretty amazing, okay.”

Within that record, though, was a style of play that McElroy now thinks will allow him to continue to recruit well in the future. That’s with them having averaged 34.1 points from 370 passing yards a game.

“What I like most is not only did they figure out a way to improve their quality of player but they also established a clear offensive identity that is going to lean very heavily towards throwing the ball all over the yard, which is going to be really appealing to other quarterbacks and other weapons that are going to be looking for, maybe, a new opportunity, whether that’s coming out of high school or in the transfer portal,” said McElroy. “After what happened for Kyle McCord, how can you not be at least somewhat intrigued by the opportunity to go play for Fran Brown and this offense that’s going to put the quarterback in a great position?”

That record also had some quality victories among the ten that they got. That included their ninth one in the season finale that may have alone led to the perfect grade from McElroy.

“They also has some really good wins. You go and you knock off Ohio. Ohio went on to win the MAC Championship. You go and you knock off Mountain West runner-up – UNLV. One of just a couple of losses for UNLV in the regular season. They won a lot of close games as well. They were 7-2 in games that were decided by one possession.

“If that’s not enough for you, they knock off Miami in the final game of the regular season, finishing the biggest comeback in school history down three touchdowns. They rally to win 42-38 at home and they recorded just their second ten-win season since 2001,” said McElroy. “Look, their schedule was relatively manageable but, guess what? He took care of business and, with the big opportunities he had? To play on a big setting against a Miami team that had everything to play for – to knock them off? That took this from an A or an A- to an A+. That win by itself tells you all you need to know.”

Brown’s hire paid off for the Orange with what he did with his debut. He’ll now try to continue to replicate that and this letter grade going into his second season in 2025.