Kyle McCord is letting it rip at Syracuse

Let’s talk about the spike, although Kyle McCord wants to move past it. The spike is at the heart of who McCord is now at Syracuse: himself. Not some image of who Kyle McCord should be. Not some image of what his coaches demand him to be. Kyle McCord is playing fast and free, and all the emotions he played with as a little leaguer have come tumbling out.

Like the spike. It happened two Saturdays ago against Georgia Tech. Third-and-2 in the third quarter. Syracuse up 24-14 at its own 16-yard line. McCord takes the snap and is chased out of the pocket. He takes off running to his left toward the sideline, tiptoeing downfield as a Georgia Tech defender tries to grab him from behind.

McCord loses his balance and as he goes out of bounds, he spikes the ball — partly in anger because he thought he could have gotten more yards, partly in excitement because while he might not quite be a “mobile quarterback” he absolutely can pick up big yards with his legs when needed. The crowd stood and roared in approval. On the sideline itself, Syracuse safety Justin Barron started jumping up and down and high-stepping toward McCord.

Upstairs in the press box, quarterbacks coach Nunzio Campanile scanned the field for flags, expecting a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. None came. “I don’t think he’ll do that again, but I also think that fired our guys up,” Campanile said.

It was spontaneous and emotional and completely unexpected. It was the perfect reintroduction for McCord.

Syracuse sits at 2-0 headed into Friday night’s game against Stanford (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN App) thanks in large part to the Ohio State transfer quarterback, who has thrown for 735 yards, eight touchdowns to one interception and is completing 69% of his passes. Two games is a small sample size, but McCord told ESPN in a recent interview he was having more fun now than at any point in his college career.

“It feels like high school football all over again where I’m out there just having fun with my friends,” McCord said. “I feel like when you get to that mindset, it just allows you to have a lot of confidence in yourself and just play, almost subconsciously. You’re not overthinking anything. You’re just reacting to what you see.”

That was exactly what Syracuse coach Fran Brown envisioned when he hopped on a plane to Columbus the day McCord entered the transfer portal to convince him they could win right now, but only if he said yes. Brown had the entire speech laid out in his mind. He rehearsed it on the plane.

The two had a familiarity with each other going back to youth football. As the story goes, McCord’s father, Derek, worked for a healthcare company and was doing an evaluation at one of his hospitals when he met Brown’s wife, Teara, who was doing a fellowship to become a chief registered nurse anesthetist. Teara Brown mentioned her husband, Fran, who was an assistant coach at Temple at the time.

Derek McCord played at Rutgers and was familiar with Fran, who is from Camden, New Jersey, about half an hour from where the McCords lived in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Like any proud dad, McCord took out his phone and started showing Teara videos of 13-year-old Kyle playing on his youth football team. Teara told Fran. Fran showed up to watch practice, and so began an informal relationship that, as fate would have it, brought them back together last December.

After one season as the starter at Ohio State, McCord entered the transfer portal. By just about any measure, McCord had a highly successful season with the Buckeyes, throwing for 3,170 yards — the seventh-highest single-season total in school history — while completing 66% of his passes and throwing 24 touchdowns.

But when Ohio State loses to Michigan, as they did last year 30-24, stat lines are sometimes rendered meaningless. McCord was told it would be best to move on, and so he did, his head held high. He had plenty of suitors, but the first was Brown.

The Syracuse coach figured there would be skepticism at first — Brown, a first-time head coach, coming off a job as defensive backs coach at Georgia — trying to sell one of the best quarterbacks in the country on a school that had last won an outright conference title in 1998.

But Brown also knew he had that Jersey connection, and his deeply held conviction that he — and only he — could provide McCord what he needed to become the best version of himself.

“I told him the truth,” Brown said. “I said, ‘Kyle, I need you to come play for me.’ I’m not going to have as much NIL money as everybody else. I won’t have all these things, but what I’m going to do is care about you more than any football coach has ever cared about you. I’m going to do everything that’s needed for you to be successful. I will not sleep if I need to not sleep. If you come play for me and we win, it’s going to be bigger than anything you’ve ever done before.”

The connections to home did not stop with Brown. McCord knew offensive coordinator Jeff Nixon from youth football. Derek McCord coached Kyle and Jeff’s son, Will, on the same youth football team for three years, starting when Kyle was 5 and Will was 6. Will Nixon ultimately transferred to Syracuse, too.

Brown also retained Campanile and moved him from tight ends coach to quarterbacks coach. Campanile spent nearly two decades coaching New Jersey high school football — including Matt Simms, who eventually started working with Kyle McCord as a private coach.

From the moment McCord arrived on campus in January, he felt as if he was home. Not only because he was surrounded by so many people from his childhood, but because they all put their belief in him to go out there and be little league Kyle again. Brown told him: “I’m the head football coach. You are second in command.”

“He has my back 100%,” McCord said. “When you know that your head coach feels that way about you, it just allows you to go out and play free and have fun. A lot of the guys on the team feel that way, too.”

Indeed, Syracuse has taken on the personality of its two leaders — tireless workers, highly competitive, Jersey tough guys, overlooked in some ways. But maybe above all else, both Brown and McCord know how to make those around them believe.

“It’s that inner drive of, ‘I know I can, and I’m going to show you I can and I’m going make you believe,'” Brown said. “That’s what Kyle has inside of him.”

McCord spent hours poring over the playbook to familiarize himself with the system Nixon brought with him from the NFL, so that playing would become second nature. He spent hours getting to know and working with his receivers and tight ends, to build not only the right chemistry with them, but to make sure they also were as involved in learning the playbook as he was.

It helped that Syracuse returned one of the best hybrid tight end/receivers in the country in Oronde Gadsden II, who came back to the Orange in large part because of McCord. Trebor Pena also returned from a hamstring injury that limited him to one game last season, and Syracuse signed Zeed Haynes and Jackson Meeks from the transfer portal.

The relationship with Campanile blossomed, too. If Campanile had a correction on footwork or technique, McCord understood it immediately because he had learned it from Simms. Nixon made sure to loop McCord into meetings to discuss the offense, what he liked, what he thought he and the receivers could do well, helping build a rapport that put them both on the same page.

Those meetings continue every Thursday on game week. And it seems as if they’re effective: Syracuse ranks No. 3 in the ACC in offense, No. 2 in passing offense and McCord ranks No. 1 in passing yards per game.

“The throws he is making, he’s getting the ball out on time and playing with an aggressiveness that you have to feel really comfortable with yourself and confident in your performance to be able to cut the ball loose the way he has in these first couple games,” Campanile said. “That’s the guy that we thought that we were getting.”

McCord points to his relationship with Nixon as one reason why. He said between 10 and 15 times in the first two games, he has wanted to run a specific play in a crucial situation that Nixon ultimately calls into his helmet.

“It’s how you know you’re on the same page as the offensive coordinator and that you’re seeing it the same way and have the same feel of the game,” McCord said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to do, to get to a point where I had a feeling of what he was going to call and why he was going to call it.”

For Derek McCord, watching his son play with fire and determination again, and doing it with Brown, has been especially gratifying.

“I’ve been telling people I’m pinching myself these first two weeks,” he said. “I want this dream to keep happening because it’s exceeded my expectations. It’s just great to see him playing at a high level, like I knew he had the potential to. The team is doing so well, and it’s all come together so quickly. It’s pretty amazing.”

Especially considering how many portal players have integrated seamlessly with players such as Gadsden, LeQuint Allen, Pena and the returners on the offensive line. It looks as if they have been playing together for years, not just two games. Campanile and Brown say that all goes back to McCord, and the way he worked in the offseason to ensure the rhythm and chemistry was there from the start.

“If he keeps playing this way, which I really strongly believe he will, everyone will see that he’s always been this player,” Campanile said. “He just needed to be given the opportunity and be put in a situation where everybody fully believes in him. Everybody here certainly believes in him.”

Kyle McCord says the Syracuse offense has not even “scratched the surface” yet. Bigger tests will come. But the feeling he has — lining up with his old friend Will Nixon next to him, Jeff Nixon calling plays, Brown and Campanile urging him to just be himself, play with emotion and everything else will fall into place — is ultimately why he came to Syracuse.

So it’s hard to blame him when he gets fired up after a big play. The spikes, though? He might just have to save those for the practice field.

“I don’t know if reintroducing myself is the right way to put it, but I definitely feel like I’ve been playing with a chip on my shoulder, just given the way everything played itself out last year,” McCord said.

“I feel like a lot of people thought my motivation would be to go out and prove people wrong. But really, it was just to prove myself right.”