We’re a quarter of the way through Fran Brown’s first season as head coach of the Orange, which means we have a fair enough sample size to begin judging his coaching ability. The team is 2-1, coming off of a gut-wrenching loss to Stanford on Friday night. One thing that many are extremely critical of, and I fall into this camp, is a coach’s ability to manage a clock when time is running out.
Fran Brown started out on fire against Ohio in terms of this issue. If you don’t remember, Brown decided to take his timeouts late in the second quarter to give his offense a chance to score some points. What did they do? March down the field in 45 seconds for a much-needed insurance touchdown. For a first-time head coach in just his second quarter, that was pretty gusty and impressive.
Georgia Tech it wasn’t noticeable, which is a good thing. But Stanford is certainly a debate. To set the scene, Syracuse led Stanford by one point with 3:13 to play. The Cardinal began to drive down the field, and the Orange had three timeouts to play with. Brown decided not to use any of those timeouts until there were 37 seconds on the clock, with the game on the line on fourth and nine.
Brown, who was a defensive backs coach at Georgia, said in the postgame press conference that he took the timeout because he saw Jayden Bellamy in single coverage on Stanford’s star receiver Elic Ayomanor, who already had a stellar touchdown grab in the contest. He opted to switch him out for Clarence Lewis, who is superior in man coverage. Also interesting to note is that Syracuse sent a lot of pressure on third down and forced an incompletion, however sent just three on fourth and dropped a lot of players back in coverage.
We all know what happens next: Stanford finds Ayomanor with a perfect throw on the back shoulder, runs out the clock, and kicks the game-winning field goal. All of this begs the question: Should Fran Brown have used his timeouts to try and get the ball back?
This is debatable, but my gut says no. At that point, you sold out trying to get the stop, and once they were in field goal range it was essentially over. But many others disagree, so this should spark plenty of discourse.
At the end of the day, the result stays the same and Brown faces his first piece of adversity as head coach. Will the Orange storm right back? Well, they have a cupcake matchup to get their swagger back on Saturday with Holy Cross.
