If the Orange are to keep succeeding, there’s some lessons that can be learned from coach P’s tenure.
From start to finish during the 2024 season, there was one Syracuse Orange football name coach Fran Brown consistently set the mark his team wanted to play and succeed like: Paul Pasqualoni.
Brown invoked the Pasqualoni name along with other iconic Syracuse football greats when he was first introduced as head coach. It was equally as important for Brown to establish the new D.A.R.T. would be the real deal going forward, but also the standards, benchmarks and aspirations beyond 2024.
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Brown already checked off the first box in the laundry list of resembling the tenures for one of Syracuse’s most notable football coaches ever. Brown and the Orange reached 10 wins for the first time since 2018; he became the first Syracuse rookie head coach to get to 10 wins since… coach P himself.
The hard task was building up some initial momentum. Now comes the hard part for coach Brown.
How to keep it going?
Some keys to success may lie in that Coach P tenure from decades ago. The world of college football is vastly different, but the strategies are certainly the same.
Coach P took over the program at an interesting turning point in Syracuse’s football history. 1991 marked the Orange’s first year in the Big East and first time being part of a conference ever. He was taking over for the great Dick MacPherson, another familiar name Brown has brought up, who guided the Orange to the well-known and historic 1987 season.
The success from Pasqualoni’s rookie year as coach is eerily similar to coach Brown’s: a pair of ranked victories, 10 wins on the season and capping the year off with a nice bowl game dub.
But the big key for Pasqualoni after that first year was maintaining consistency.
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Syracuse got to seven wins or more in eight of his first nine years. That included a run of five straight bowl games from 1995 to 1999 (most in a row in program history) and just one outlier year (2002, 4-8). Three of coach P’s least successful years (2002 to 2004) all came during his last three years at the helm.
Within his tenure, the year that really stands out is 1992 — coach P’s second year. Syracuse didn’t have a drop off at all. Like 1991, that year’s team won 10 games, beat four ranked teams and likewise finished the year with a bowl win.
Is there a secret formula of maintaining that success from year one to year two coach Brown could also follow that clearly worked for coach P?
Looking back at the history, a few things stand out:
- Bringing back the starting QB at the time (Marvin Graves) helped a lot. Graves in a career year ended up leading the Big East in completion percentage, yards per pass and passing efficiency rating per Sports-Reference. He ended up third all-time in passing yards in program history.
- Syracuse in 1991 had both the 15th-best offense and defense. In 1992, Syracuse dropped to 18th on offense but stayed in the top-15 on defense.
- Like Syracuse in 2024 but maybe not as advanced as it is now, the spread offense was a staple for those Coach P-led Syracuse teams.
- Development and talent upside, particularly from the offense, definitely played a factor. The ‘92 ended up with six players getting taken in the NFL Draft, five of which were on offense.
- Don’t underrate the defense either. Seven defensive players (five of which were starters) from the ‘91 team would return for 1992, which might help to explain why the defense stayed at a pretty high level.
- Looking beyond 1992, recruiting most certainly played arguably the largest role in the sustained success after year one.
The deck of cards coach Brown has to work in year two with will definitely be different compared to coach P had. There are plenty of departures on both sides of the field- including the possibility that Brown will be replacing his starting quarterback This Syracuse program is clearly in a better spot, but that 2025 schedule for the Orange looms like a hungry bear finding some easy prey and the team was obviously in a much different tier back then compared to now. The context that is the current world of college football is just fundamentally different than it was in the nineties.
Yet, I still think there’s some important lessons coach Brown can learn from Pasqualoni.
Recruitment (especially in the Northeast) and player development is going to be key. It worked for coach P and that helps to explain what ended up being sustained success for the team for pretty much his entire tenure. So too will player development.
But keeping the standards, more than anything, will be the most significant task for Brown.
Look back to coach P’s tenure. After 1992, Syracuse had a slight dip in success in ‘93 and ‘94 (6-4-1 and 7-4). After that came a second leap to that aforementioned run in the mid-nineties.
What changed? Nothing. The standards stayed at their highest level. Being adequate wasn’t good enough. Coach P said it best in this piece from The Athletic reflecting on when he took over as the coach:
“I’m not smart, but I’m smart enough to know that when I took over, I wanted continuity. I wasn’t gonna let the culture of the program slip.”
Now, compare that to coach Brown after earning that historic win over Miami:
“We’re growing. We just have to keep pushing. I will never be satisfied with second place or third place. That’s like a loser’s mentality.”
Culture will be the one thing that will hopefully translate from coach P’s tenure to coach Brown’s. It certainly didn’t translate in the long-term with the 21st century successors to coach P. If it did, it was nothing more than a flash in the pan.
If we’re directly comparing Pasqualoni’s road at the helm to coach Brown’s start to his tenure, the parallels are pretty strong. Would year two for Brown play out exactly like coach P’s did? It’s tough to say.
What’s easier to conclude: coach Brown does have the same mentality as coach P.
For fans holding out hope for sustained success going forward, that’s the most important thing all of Orange Nation can keep their faith without question.