Fran Brown came to Syracuse with a vision.

“It's all back to DART," Brown said before the start of fall camp. "You know, just being detailed, accountable, relentless and tough in all aspects.”

Brown took over the program in December, replacing Dino Babers.

“I learned to be a good listener," Brown said. "I like to please, even though I might be firm about the things that I want to do, I like to please and I don't want to let the players down. I want to make sure that they feel that their work, that I'm holding them up to a standard that they need to be at.”

A mindset that has its roots in his hometown of Camden, New Jersey. It’s a city of 70,000 people, and a place where nothing came easy for, he and his family in the early years.

“My mother had me at 13 years old going on 14," Brown said. "By the age of 21, she had four boys. So you're talking about hard. I was the dirty kid that they tried to crack jokes on. I was the guy that went to school, didn't have all the stuff everybody else had. But what I knew that I wasn't going to do. Because I've got an uncle named Charles Brown. He told me, don't ever, ever, ever allow your situations to dictate your outcome. You make the best. You dominate. You get up and you walk every single day. And I bust my butt. [There were] a lot of tears. I got a lot of pain inside of me, guys.”

Camden gave Fran Brown limited options in his youth.

“There's two things you could do," Brown said. "You will go this way or you go that way, you know? And I'm not going to look at all the guys that tried to do it, the sneaky route and do it. They ended up in jail. Some did, you know, different things. And I watched the guys that did it the right way. And they have families, they got an education, they got degrees. They're doing things with their life. So I figured, just go that way. You know, I'm not meant for jail, so just stay focused on the other side.”

It’s where he found football and the joys that came with it. He learned from coaches growing up and developed a valuable trait that serves him each and every day.

“I've always been able to identify who had a pure heart and who doesn't, you know, and I've been able to do that," Brown said "So that's helped me be able to follow what's needed to follow, because ultimately I'm a man of faith first and I'm a father and I'm a husband. So being able to do that, that was important to me to see that because I didn't have that, didn't understand that. So when I saw it, it was something that I was attracted to. You know, I wanted I wanted it bad.”

It’s that kind of beginning that has shaped the Orange's newest head football coach. He says he is a person who never takes the credit and puts others on the pedestal before him.

“When you always doing things for others and things that are about other people and seeing them happy, you know, you get to be a part of it, it makes it bigger because now everybody remembers that time," Brown said. "We got to do it together. I just remember how you felt. I remember those things.”

He’s ready for the challenge. Brown is prepared to bring the national spotlight back to Central New York just as it was two decades ago, by channeling the energy of past legends like Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little.

“Everything we do here is about the 'S'," Brown said. "I just want to make sure that I give that as an opportunity of just being able to be where it belongs, you know? The other night, I was like, literally, I came back up here and I went around those two statues and just like super thankful. So I'm very, very thankful that I'm the head coach here. It means a lot.”