Stampede Bonus: 2025 USF Quarterbacks Breakdown
What should we expect from Byrum Brown in 2025?
When we’ve finished profiling an entire unit, we’ll run through a final breakdown of that position group at large. We’ll touch on a quick overview of the group, then I’ll break it down by tiers as far as how I see playing time shaking out. Finally, I’ll pose one Big Question that I have about the unit approaching the season, and my general level of confidence.
If you missed any unit breakdowns, you can find them here. Note: I was alerted that some of the links in the recent unit breakdowns were dead. Sorry about that! They should be good to go now.
The Overview:
Note: from left to right, the columns are player number, player name, eligibility, On3 consensus recruit rating out of high school (asterisk if the player transferred to USF), FBS snaps in 2024, career FBS games (with 2024 games in parentheses), career FBS starts (with 2024 starts in parentheses), completion percentage, passing yards, TD/INT ratio, rushing attempts, rushing yards, and rushing touchdowns, and school in 2024 (if not USF).
Byrum Brown returns, of course, but a good deal has changed here:
- Izzy Carter transferred to Norfolk State in the offseason. Carter was an impressive athlete and played well on a couple late drives against Rice when Bryce Archie was injured, but he was pretty clearly the Bulls’ third-choice quarterback behind Brown and Archie (subscribe to the Ponderosa for details!).
- Speaking of Bryce Archie: he was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in the MLB Draft, and left the team to pursue his big league dreams. Extremely cool for Archie, who was otherwise set to be the Bulls’ second-string quarterback again this season.
- Once Archie left, USF got an extremely fortuitous commitment from former Tennessee backup Gaston Moore, who is familiar with Golesh’s offensive system from his time with the Vols, and UCF before that.
- And, of course, incoming freshman Locklan Hewlett has been on a meteoric rise through the theoretical depth chart this offseason. Hewlett looked fantastic in the spring, and has received praise from the coaching staff throughout fall camp. Golesh recently told the press that Hewlett has earned some practice reps with the second team.
It’s a pretty impressive group, but quarterback is a zero-sum game. It’s all going to come down to Byrum Brown.
The Prospectus:
Tier 1: Byrum Brown
If he’s healthy, Brown is starting. More on that in a moment!
Tier 2: Gaston Moore and Locklan Hewlett
It gets somewhat interesting here. Moore played genuine, meaningful snaps last season for Tennessee when Nico Iamaleava was banged up, and he’s already familiar with USF’s offensive system. I suspect that he’ll be filling the Bryce Archie role this season and serving as Brown’s backup, as needed. Hewlett is very clearly being treated as the Bulls’ quarterback of the future, but I get the impression that the staff would prefer to have his freshman season be limited to spot duty so that he can preserve his redshirt.
Tier 3: Marcelis Tate
I’ve not seen any indication that Tate is in the QB2 mix. Barring something strange, I don’t think we’ll see him play this season, but his career is still young.
The Big Question: Is Byrum ready?
This is perhaps the Biggest of all Big Questions we’ve posed thus far. If I were to rank Big Questions (should I do this? I might do this. I’m currently making a note to myself to do this), this would probably land at number one. USF can win some games without Byrum Brown - we saw that last season - but pretty much any realistic road to AAC title contention necessarily involves Brown under center.
To that point: when I ask if Brown is ready, I don’t mean to ask if he’s healthy enough to play. I’m more so asking “is Byrum Brown capable of playing at the level we saw him play at in 2023?”
Let’s break that down a little bit:
- When Byrum Brown played last season, how much worse was his performance than it was in 2023?
Even before Brown got hurt last season, the Bulls’ passing game was very clearly not clicking like it was in 2023. Even if we adjust for the fact that the Bulls weren’t passing the ball as much in 2024, Brown’s per-game and per-attempt numbers were worse in 2024 pretty much across the board (for reference, I’ve counted the 2024 Tulane game as half a game for Brown’s purposes).
OK, not ideal. But what if we removed the Alabama game from the 2024 numbers? Brown was uncharacteristically spotty against Bama last season, and while all games count the same, I don’t particularly feel like his performance against Bama is indicative of how he’ll perform in conference play. Since Brown only played in 4.5 games last season, and 2023 Brown gets to include games against the likes of Charlotte, UAB, and Rice, that rough outing in Tuscaloosa is skewing our 2024 data set a bit.
So if you take out the Bama game: in Byrum Brown’s remaining 3.5 games in 2024 (Bethune-Cookman, Southern Miss, Miami, and the first half against Tulane), his performance was much closer to what we saw in 2023, with the dips generally attributable to the fact that he was throwing an average of five times less per game.
I’m sure everyone is crying foul right now. “AJ, you fool, obviously if you remove the worst game that someone played, their numbers will look better.” I get it! My point is: I definitely don’t think Byrum Brown played as well in 2024 as he did in 2023, but I also don’t really think that we got a full sample size with which to judge his ‘24 work. Three of the five games he played in were against Bama, Miami, and Tulane. That’s not the same quality of defense he’s going to be seeing for most of the 2025 season (well, at least not after the first three games).
- Why exactly was there a dip in his performance in 2024?
I’ve given you one culprit already in the brutal 2024 schedule. Let me point you to another: the offensive line.
Folks, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the USF offensive line was a bit of a mess early in 2024. The chart below shows three things: the percentage of passing plays where a QB had a clean pocket, his passer rating (the NFL calculation) when he had a clean pocket, and his passer rating when he was under pressure. I’ve pulled these numbers for Byrum Brown in 2023, Brown in 2024, and Bryce Archie in 2024. All data here is from PFF.
This validates something that I think we all saw last season: the offensive line had Byrum Brown running for his life way too often. His “clean pocket percentage” dipped from a just-under-median 64.7% to a brutal 57.3%, and the Bulls’ passing game suffered as a result. If you’re curious, you can see below that Brown’s “clean pocket percentage” was the worst that a USF quarterback had to handle since these numbers started being tracked. Not great!
If you want some good news: you can see that once the offensive line got healthy, figured out their ideal lineup, and faced the easier end of the schedule, their performance skyrocketed. Bryce Archie’s clean pocket percentage was pretty solid, which gives me some hope that this season’s offensive line will be able to protect Brown much better than they did in 2024.
If you want some bad news: if you look at the chart, you’ll note that while Brown was under pressure a lot more in 2024, his passer rating in both clean pockets and under pressure was a good deal worse than in 2023. That suggests that it’s not just the offensive line that was slumping.
What about the receivers? USF unexpectedly lost Naiem Simmons and Jaden Alexis to injury before the start of the 2024 season. Both were presumed starters, or close to it, and both possessed the kind of big-play and separation ability that some of USF’s more possession-oriented receivers lacked. Without Simmons and Alexis, the downfield passing game that we’d seen in 2023 basically vanished entirely, at least until Keshaun Singleton emerged in the second half of the season.
This chart shows us the percentage of Brown’s throws in 2023 and 2024 that were behind the line of scrimmage, short (0-9 yards), medium (10-19), and long (20+). It also shows his completion percentage on each type of throw.
The deep passing game isn’t the only spot where USF’s performance took a dip, but it’s definitely the biggest one. For one, you can see that USF just did not take many deep shots in Brown’s four-and-a-half games in 2024 - the percentage of deep throws was basically cut in half. And their success rate on those throws was candidly horrid at just 7%. Some of that can be attributed to the lack of gamebreakers at receiver, and I think a good deal of it will be remedied by the presence of Singleton and the addition of some potentially dynamic new players in the receivers room. But anyone who watched Brown sail a few open deep balls in the Alabama game could tell you that receivers not getting open wasn’t the entirety of the problem here.
There’s no easy answer. The struggles of USF’s passing game in 2024 were the result of a smorgasbord of issues: the brutal schedule, the offensive line, the receivers, and yes, Byrum Brown. The good news is that I think the offensive line could be much improved, and the receivers are deeper and more experienced than they were last season, even with Sean Atkins departing. But Brown will need to play better as well.
- What happens if 2024 Brown is the new normal?
So we’ve been over some reasons for optimism. But the negativity gremlin in the darkest corners of your mind must be screaming right now: what if Brown simply doesn’t play better?
I want to be very clear here: 2024 Byrum Brown is still a perfectly good G5-level quarterback. If you look at some of the numbers above - and even with all the complicating factors we discussed - he still performed better than pretty much any non-Quinton Flowers USF quarterback of the last decade. Plus, all this discussion of Brown’s passing chops omits possibly his greatest strength: his running ability. Brown is an excellent runner, to the point where his presence in the backfield immediately raises the ceiling of the Bulls’ offense, no matter how he’s throwing the ball. After seeing USF perform relatively well against the underbelly of the American Conference with Bryce Archie under center, I’m pretty confident that the Bulls could win six or seven games again this season with 2024 Byrum Brown.
What I don’t feel confident in, however, is this team’s ability to contend for a conference title without Brown regaining his 2023 form (or better!). I don’t think this is a conference-title-or-bust year, by any means; in fact, I think this team is a year away at a lot of different position groups. But a transcendent, 2023-type season from Brown could be enough to elevate them to that rarified air.