The Syracuse Orange Football 2025 Preview

When Dino Babers took over Syracuse football as head coach in 2016, he vowed to make the Orange a program that was “Consistently good, not occasionally great.” Ultimately, in a cruel twist of irony, Babers was fired from Syracuse after failing to deliver any momentum to the program after his 10-3 campaign in his second season.

Athletic Director John Wildhack went off-board in filling that vacancy, hiring Fran Brown to replace Babers, and Brown rewarded the risk with a 10-3 campaign in his rookie season.

One of the challenges that faces an coach at Syracuse is the reality that the resources are thin. Yet the expectations are that Syracuse is able to compete at a level that matches schools with double the budgets. For example, if you went around asking fans if they think Syracuse should beat Duke this year, I think a majority would say “yes.”

Duke is currently paying their starting quarterback $8 million for the 2025 season, while the rumor was that Kyle McCord was offered closer to the $500K price.1 The ACC isn’t the SEC or B1G in terms of spend per school, but every school aside from Wake Forest is committed to pivoting all resources towards football in order to build a lifeboat in case the ACC fails.2

But even before pay-to-play became the name of the game across College Football, Syracuse has struggled with resourcing. Doug Marrone, probably the most successful “modern” coach in Syracuse history, struggled with resourcing and expectations and made it so well known, the NFL thought an 8-5 record and a four-way split of the Big East title was enough of an accomplishment to warrant a job with the Buffalo Bills.

Fran Brown managed to spend year one leveraging a lot of untapped potential at Syracuse with modern recruiting and social media marketing that put Syracuse on the map. In what seems so obviously simple in retrospect, Brown simply gave a shit about Syracuse as an institution and as a public community while not shying away from the more flashy things that kids enjoy.

Whether it was more proactive community service and outreach attempts or bringing in expensive cars and hibachi to recruiting events, Brown took up space publicly, and behind the scenes, was radically changing the infrastructure that supports the football team.

The strategy was fairly straightforward. Bring an SEC mentality to the ACC in a location that against all odds, does have an identity and program history to rebuild alumni support. In the interview above with Adam Breneman, Brown doesn’t shy away from showing the relentless mentality he models and expects every player, coach, and staffer to emulate.

That relentless/always on mentality is what is needed for Syracuse to succeed. If the resources aren’t there, the hard work has to close the gap. In this new world, a 10-3 season is met with your best returning starters on both sides of the ball being poached by Penn State3 and Texas4. So what the hell does Fran Brown do in year two?