Syracuse AD Wants the Basketball Powerhouse to Prioritize Football

First-year Syracuse athletic director Bryan Blair wants the traditional college basketball powerhouse to start taking football more seriously. He put an exclamation point on it by appearing at football coach Fran Brown’s scheduled press conference Monday. 

“Football matters here at Syracuse,” Blair said at the podium. “Football matters in the grander equation for what we’re trying to do. We actually just spent some time going through our ACC media distribution, and I don’t think many people realize how heavily that favors football and what you do. So, football is vital to the future of Syracuse athletics. It’s really important that we get this right.”

Syracuse is 4-4 this season, riding the momentum of back-to-back ACC wins over North Carolina and SMU. The Orange will host Clemson on Saturday at the 49,000-seat JMA Wireless Dome, with ACC Network’s traveling ACC Huddle show set to broadcast from campus.

“We want that dome packed out,” Blair said. “I stood in front of a podium like this when I first got the job and talked about weaponizing the dome, and we haven’t fully gotten there yet. But what I will say is last week in that crowd at [the] SMU [game], you felt tentacles of what it can feel like when that place is rocking. You felt that deafening noise. You saw an opponent scrambling to get signals in. We need people not just to show up and attend the game—we need people to show up and be a part of the game and create that atmosphere that makes this the hardest place to play in the entire country. The opportunity is right in front of us.”

Blair also talked up the dome in an extensive interview with Front Office Sports last week. He also talked about the difficulties of being a Division I athletic director in the era of NIL contracts and the free-for-all transfer portal.

Below are some excerpts of his conversation with FOS editor in chief Dan Roberts, some of which have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Front Office Sports: You have been the AD there for only a few months—you started in March—kind of head spinning, right, because literally days into the job you hire a new basketball coach [Gerry McNamara].

Bryan Blair: Yeah, a little unorthodox. It’s not the way you would draw it up. But you get hired and then immediately it’s like, ‘Congratulations, you got the job… go find us a basketball coach.’ I actually had not stepped foot in Syracuse, and immediately we hopped on a plane and started flying around the country. But I think it worked out pretty well.

FOS: Do you feel like it’s really hard for McNamara because Jim Boeheim just kind of stands like a shadow over the program? I think of Kalen DeBoer at Alabama [following Nick Saban].

BB: The funny thing is: I meet Coach Boeheim, and he’s like, ‘I work for you, so let me know what you need.’ I kind of laughed it off, and then I go to the staff directory and it said ‘special assistant to the AD.’ He pops in the office two or three days a week and I’ve got one of the top coaches of all time asking me what I need him to do. But I think Coach Boeheim is a positive for our program. He’s around, but it never feels like there’s any interference. He just wants to support and he wants to see this program back to where he knows it needs to be.

FOS: To what extent do you feel like you have to try to balance what the school’s known for—the brand of Syracuse—as you grow the athletic side?

BB: Our tradition’s one of our strongest suits. The story, the brand of Syracuse travels nationally and internationally. Mike Tico was telling a story last night of wearing the block ‘S’ and being at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and you’re talking about the voice of sport, and he’s in Paris getting noticed, and people are yelling ‘Go Orange’ who have no idea who he is. You’ve gotta lean into that, because that’s big, and that’s important for the program, but you also can’t steer your boat by the wake. So we have to look ahead and do things differently than we ever have. 

FOS: Enrollment at Syracuse is down. Do you feel added pressure that athletics has to help make up for part of that?

BB: Pressure is a privilege. Our chancellor was forthright with me during the interview process and articulated why he views athletics as mission-critical to what he’s trying to do on behalf of the university. So I wouldn’t say it’s pressure, because I’ve always viewed athletics as not the most important thing, but an integral piece to the puzzle of the much larger university…. We exist to serve the broader institutional mission, I think it’s probably more prevalent or open about it at Syracuse given this current time and period. But [Chancellor Haynie] stood in front of our staff and said to our entire department, ‘I don’t want you to be successful, I need you to be successful. Relevant to what we’re trying to do as an institution.’ I think that’s a very empowering feeling.

FOS: What is the job of an AD right now in 2026?

BB: It’s a lot of Excel spreadsheets. And talking to people that can support this program. But I still think it boils down to people. I’ve got to get the right people on board, get them the right seat on the bus. Then you have to generate more resources. So people, culture, strategy, and resources. That resource piece is front and center because now, really for the first time ever, your success on the field is not all but in part predicated on your ability to generate and spend resources and spend them effectively.

FOS: Who are the potential mega-donors for Syracuse athletics and are you knocking on those doors? 

BB: 110%. I’m in New York City right now doing just that. We have what we need to be successful. Certainly there are some outliers out there, in terms of ‘we’ve got this one individual, he can make all our problems go away.’ I’ve not yet found that piece of it at Syracuse. But what I have found is a passionate group of supporters that have done really well for themselves and want to see and hear a vision that they get excited about, and they want to lean in and do something transformational… Think about the Mount Rushmore of sports broadcasting—a lot of Syracuse grads… And many of them are understated. They’re not the prominent name that you see out there, flashy, talking a lot, but behind the scenes they’ve allowed us to do some really amazing things. 

FOS: What do you make of where things stand with the health of the ACC?

BB: I’m really proud to be a member of the ACC. I think Commissioner Phillips is a great leader for the conference. I think what makes him so special is he understands the plight of an AD more than, frankly, any of the other commissioners. He understands the pressures that we face that are unique to the role. Also, what I love about the ACC is how we stand out from the crowd. We’re different than every other ACC school in a really good way. I love the fact that we’re in central New York… I think being unique in a league that feels very similar otherwise gives us an opportunity to kind of zig when some others are zagging, so we’re going to lean into that. I think the basketball heritage of the ACC matches the basketball heritage of Syracuse. And from a football standpoint, everybody can beat everybody on any given Saturday. So that gives you an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, we always feel like we’ve got hope.’ And I think hope is incredibly powerful.

FOS: What will the conference realignment picture look like in five to 10 years?

‘It All Feels a Little Unsettled’

BB: It all feels a little unsettled. There’s just been so much movement. You ask yourself: Is this the permanent version of college athletics? Is this where we’re going to be? All of these TV contracts come up between 2029 and 2034 for the most part. So, I don’t know that we get five to 10 years to find out what that version looks like—maybe it’s status quo, more or less. Maybe we slide some deck chairs around and call it good, or maybe it looks completely different. The one thing I’ve tried to talk to people at Syracuse about is we’ve got to make sure we’re the best version of ourselves, whatever happens in the future. We can’t predict the future. If we’re not the best version of ourselves, we’re going to be really unhappy with what happens thereafter, because we’re ceding our control to somebody else to make decisions about our future.

FOS: What is your take on a potential 24-team College Football Playoff?

BB: Maybe I’m a little bit different because I played FCS football—at Wofford in South Carolina. We didn’t have a conference championship game. They selected a conference champion and you went to a playoff. You got meaningful football and you competed on the field to sort it out. The piece that makes it the most special to me is the opportunity to host a home playoff game. Hosting a home playoff game in the dome in that second week of December would be one of the most transformational sports experiences in central New York history. Two years ago we were a Top 25, 10-win program, and we would have been in a 24-team playoff. I just don’t know that you get that same thing from a bowl game. Bowls nowadays—with the young people, the compensation that we’re having—I don’t know that it means maybe what it used to. I think a 24-team playoff for those teams fighting at the end of the season to try to get in, that matters a lot. And if you can dangle a carrot for those top teams that have some incentive to perform better at the end too, I think we can get something that’s really, really compelling.