Kyle McCord is giving his best in Syracuse

Let's talk about finishing, even though Kyle McCord wants to put it behind him. Finishing is the essence of who McCord is now at Syracuse: himself. Not an image of what Kyle McCord should be. Not an image of what his coaches demand he be. Kyle McCord is playing fast and free, and all the emotions he played with as a minor leaguer have come out.

Like the spike. It happened two Saturdays ago against Georgia Tech. Third-and-two in the third quarter. Syracuse was up 24-14 at its own 16. McCord gets the ball and is chased out of the pocket. He takes off to his left toward the sideline, tiptoeing across the field as a Georgia Tech defender tries to catch him from behind.

McCord loses his balance and, stepping out of bounds, slams the ball hard, partly out of anger because he thought he could have gained more yards, partly out of excitement because while he's not exactly a “mobile quarterback,” he can gain big yards with his legs when necessary. The crowd rose to its feet and roared in approval. On the sideline, Syracuse safety Justin Barron began jumping up and down and high-stepping toward McCord.

In the press box, quarterbacks coach Nunzio Campanile scanned the field for flags, expecting a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. There were none. “I don't think I'll do that again, but I also think it motivated our guys,” Campanile said.

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

Syracuse sits at 2-0 heading 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 and one interception and is completing 69% of his passes. Two games is a small sample size, but McCord told ESPN in a recent interview that he was having more fun now than at any other point in his college career.

“It's like playing high school football again, where I'm out there having fun with my friends,” McCord said. “I feel like when you get into that mindset, it allows you to have a lot of confidence in yourself and play, almost subconsciously. You don't think about anything too much. You just react to what you see.”

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

The two had known each other since they were playing youth football. As the story goes, McCord’s father, Derek, worked for a health care company and was doing an evaluation at one of its hospitals when he met Brown’s wife, Teara, who was doing a fellowship to become a head certified nurse anesthetist. Teara Brown mentioned her husband, Fran, who was an assistant coach at Temple at the time.

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

After one season as a starter at Ohio State, McCord entered the transfer portal. By almost every 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 it did last year, 30-24, statistics sometimes lose meaning. McCord was told he'd better move on, and he did, head held high. He had plenty of suitors, but Brown was the first.

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

But Brown also knew he had that connection to Jersey and his deep belief that he, and only he, could give 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 money as everybody else. I'm not going to have all this stuff, 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 whatever it takes to make you successful. I won't sleep if I don't need to. 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 didn't end 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 eventually transferred to Syracuse as well.

Brown also hired 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 began working with Kyle McCord as a private coach.

From the moment McCord arrived on campus in January, he felt right at home. Not just because he was surrounded by so many people from his childhood, but because they had all placed their trust in him to go out and be Kyle from the minor leagues again. Brown told him, “I'm the head football coach. You're second in command.”

“He's got my back 100 percent,” McCord said. “When you know your head coach feels the same way about you, it allows you to go out there and play freely and have fun. A lot of the guys on the team feel the same way, too.”

Indeed, Syracuse has adopted the persona of its two leaders: hard workers, highly competitive, tough guys from New Jersey, overlooked in some ways. But perhaps most of all, both Brown and McCord know how to make those around them believe.

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

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

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

The relationship with Campanile also blossomed. If Campanile had a correction in footwork or technique, McCord understood it immediately because he had learned it from Simms. Nixon made sure to include McCord in meetings to talk about the offense, what he liked, what he thought he and the receivers could do well, which helped build a relationship that put them both on the same page.

Those meetings continue every Thursday of game week and appear to be effective: Syracuse ranks third in the ACC in offense, second in passing offense and McCord ranks first in passing yards per game.

“He's getting the ball out on time and playing with an aggressiveness that makes you feel very comfortable with yourself and confident in your performance to be able to get the ball out like he's done in these first two games,” Campanile said. “That's the player we thought we were going to get.”

McCord points to his relationship with Nixon as one reason. He said that 10 to 15 times in the first two games he wanted to run a specific play in a crucial situation that Nixon ultimately ordered him to run on his helmet.

“That's how you know you're on the same page as the offensive coordinator and you see it the same way and you have the same feel for the game,” McCord said. “That's exactly what I wanted to do, to get to a point where I had an idea of ​​what I was going to call and why I was going to call it.”

For Derek McCord, watching his son return to playing with fire and determination, and doing so with Brown, has been especially rewarding.

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

Especially when you consider how many players have meshed seamlessly with the likes of Gadsden, LeQuint Allen, Pena and the returning players on the offensive line. It feels like they've been playing together for years, not just two games. Campanile and Brown say it's all down 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 like this, and I'm sure he will, everyone will see that he's always been this player,” Campanile said. “He just needed to be given the opportunity and put in a situation where everyone fully believed in him. Certainly everyone here believes in him.”

Kyle McCord says Syracuse's offense hasn't even “scraped the surface” yet. Bigger tests will come. But the feeling he gets — lining up with old friend Will Nixon at his side, Jeff Nixon calling the plays, Brown and Campanile urging him to be himself, to play with emotion and that everything else will fall into place — is ultimately why he came to Syracuse.

So it's hard to blame him when he gets upset after a big play. But what about the cleats? He might have to save them 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 grudge, given the way everything played out last year,” McCord said.

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