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Chaos engulfed Syracuse football in year two of the Fran Brown era. But, don’t fret, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

One season after going 10-3, a campaign that made the Orange seem like a rising Atlantic Coast Conference title contender, SU went 3-9, lost its final eight games by a combined margin of 220 points, let go of its wide receivers coach midseason and then fired four more coaches at the end.

It was unequivocally Syracuse’s worst stretch ever.

“I gotta learn from this storm right now and be ready to adapt to it and do it the right way next year,” Brown said on Nov. 29, following Syracuse’s 34-12 season-ending loss to what was a one-win Boston College team.

There’s a fair amount of blame to be cast on Brown for the 2025 season. And canning his assistants, like special teams coach Ricky Brumfield and offensive line coach Dale Williams, is a cop out. It’s not their fault Brown put together a roster that was inexperienced and prone to a rebuilding year (which I wrote about in August). However, there’s one glowing achievement from Brown’s past season that could fix this disaster instantly.

He brought in transfer quarterback Steve Angeli — the man who can save SU’s program from irrelevancy.

Right now, that’s what Syracuse is: irrelevant. Its embarrassing 70-7 loss to Notre Dame on Nov. 22 made SU’s one of the laughingstocks of college football. Yet, because of Angeli’s projected return from a season-ending torn Achilles, the Orange are still an attractive team for new talent in the transfer portal.

Despite a major hiccup in 2025, Brown can re-realize his 2024 success through dominating the portal. Syracuse has a rare luxury in Angeli — a proven QB1 who can lure others with his excellent play — and Brown must supplement him with other gems, who shouldn’t be hard to find.

Fran Brown roams the sidelines in Syracuse’s loss to Miami in November. Brown’s career record at SU now sits at 13-12 after a nightmare 3-9 season, caused by a poor transfer portal class. Joe Zhao | Senior Staff Photographer

To win games in this day and age, you need to hammer the transfer portal. Outside of Angeli, Brown’s first full offseason using the portal was a failure. Nobody else made a significant impact, including edge David Reese and quarterback Rickie Collins. But Brown can steer Syracuse in the right direction by marketing Angeli as someone who talented portal players can win big games with.

SU showed in 2025 that having a quality quarterback is the difference between being an ACC title dark horse and being the conference’s worst team. The Orange also proved that, when healthy, they have one of the best arms in the nation. Other players will see how Angeli performed in four starts and want to join forces. The question is, will Brown convince them?

Clearly, he thinks Syracuse would have fared astronomically better with Angeli under center instead of a revolving door with Collins, Joe Filardi and Luke Carney.

“This is the down year, in my opinion, especially after losing the quarterback,” Brown said on Nov. 17. “I feel like it would have been the opposite with the quarterback.”

The past season was still a disaster, in part because of Brown’s inactivity in the portal last offseason. He failed to ride the wave of what Kyle McCord, Oronde Gadsden II, LeQuint Allen Jr. and others brought to Syracuse in its program-changing 2024 campaign.

Brown’s success seemed to indicate SU was a place players could go to win and develop into NFL talent. He responded by recruiting zero high-level offensive and defensive linemen in the portal, which were the Orange’s two biggest positional weaknesses entering 2025.

So, without Angeli, it’s only natural SU had nobody else to pick up the pieces. Its offense wilted without a competent backup quarterback — Brown’s already said he will go after multiple game-ready signal-callers in the portal to sit behind Angeli next year — and its defense visibly lost confidence and energy while its offense sputtered.

Brown couldn’t find a solution. Syracuse’s porous, inexperienced roster forced him into a series of half-measures.

Steve Angeli warms up before Syracuse’s season-opening contest against Tennessee. Angeli finished the season as SU’s passing yards leader (1,317), despite playing four games. Leonardo Eriman | Photo Editor

He critiqued the playcalling of offensive coordinator Jeff Nixon and defensive coordinator Elijah Robinson multiple times. He benched Collins after three full games under center, then turned to a walk-on in Filardi. He played a ton of freshmen, like receiver Darien Williams, cornerback Demetres Samuel Jr., left tackle Trevion Mack and guard Byron Washington, but saw the growing pains as Syracuse played uncompetitive football for most of ACC play.

His latest attempt at a solution? Doing some house cleaning in SU’s coaching staff. Brown didn’t know, and still doesn’t know, what the problem was. He was too proud to admit that the Orange were too fickle to survive without their best player. His next staff must make it a priority to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

Whoever Brown hires next to fill his coaching vacancies, they need to be from various regions of the country to help SU cast a wide net in the transfer portal, and they also need to emphasize performance in the trenches (Brown’s offensive line coach hire will be crucial).

The Orange can recruit quality skill guys, but they showed they’re too weak on the offensive and defensive line to stand a chance against top-flight competition. Just watch the Notre Dame tape. It’s bad. Syracuse must acquire high-level, starting caliber guys up front to protect Angeli and swarm opposing quarterbacks — which Robinson’s defense has never done consistently.

But Brown can get all those players easily in the transfer portal, because they will be ecstatic to play alongside Angeli. His 1,317 passing yards through four games led the nation before suffering a catastrophic injury. He was maxing out receiver Johntay Cook’s talent as well as senior tight end Dan Villari’s receiving ability. And he was winning games that SU literally never wins — the Orange defeated Clemson in Death Valley for the first time ever in Angeli’s final start.

That resume will draw others to central New York. It won’t be Brown. It won’t be D.A.R.T., either. It will be the lure of taking the field with Angeli, whom Brown lauded as “the best quarterback in the nation.” Sell that to players in the transfer portal, and good stuff will happen. Same goes for coaches, too, who will want job security after how Brown closed things in 2025.

To avoid an even larger end-of-season mass exodus in 2026, Syracuse needs to fork up the name, image and likeness funding and drain every ounce of influence it has with Angeli. It needs to show it’s a place where quarterbacks and their supporting casts go to thrive — the standard SU set with McCord and Co., and what it was beginning to reset until mid-September this year.

But right now, that narrative is dying.

Cooper Andrews is a Senior Staff Writer at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at ccandrew@syr.edu or on X @cooper_andrews.

Published on December 2, 2025 at 9:37 am
Contact Cooper: ccandrew@syr.edu | @cooper_andrews