Stampeding Through the 2025 USF Football Roster: #17 QB Byrum Brown

USF’s most important player deserves an in-depth breakdown, so grab some coffee for this one.

PLAYER: Byrum Brown

POSITION: Quarterback

YEAR: Redshirt junior

HEIGHT/WEIGHT: 6'3", 231 lbs.

HOW DID HE GET HERE? It feels odd now, but Brown was actually pretty lightly recruited. He put up big-time numbers at Rolesville High School outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, but all of his reported offers were from mid-major programs. He committed to USF in July 2021, and enrolled the next summer. The recruiting services saw him as a mid-three-star prospect. For context: in July 2021, I still thought Jeff Scott was going to be a successful USF coach! Time has flown.

When Brown actually arrived on campus in the fall of 2022, USF was entering Jeff Scott’s third season and had a quarterback battle raging between promising sophomore Timmy McClain and Baylor transfer Gerry Bohanon. Bohanon won the job and McClain transferred out immediately after, leaving Brown as somewhere around the third-string quarterback, behind Bohanon and Katravis Marsh.

2022 was, of course, a pretty miserable season of USF football. Right when the team looked like it was starting to gel on offense, Bohanon went down with a season-ending injury. The team eventually fell to 1-8, and Scott was fired. To make matters worse, in the next game, Marsh suffered a season-ending injury of his own, and the entire year took on an air of “let’s get this over with, please.” Poll most USF fans at the time, and I think they would’ve been OK with super-simming to the end of the season.

But the end of the season gave us one pleasant development: we got to see Byrum Brown play quarterback for the first time. We got a glimpse of what he could do right away when Brown took over for Marsh on the Bulls’ last drive against SMU and threw his first career touchdown pass, a 17-yarder to Jayson Littlejohn on 3rd and 13. The next game against Tulsa was electric. Making his first start with a very depleted offense, Brown completed his first 21 passes (!!!) (including two straight flea flickers, a feat of playcalling sicko genius from Travis Trickett that I am still not entirely over), and finished with 240 yards passing, 76 yards rushing, and four total touchdowns in a 48-42 loss. Please watch the back-to-back flea flickers again!!!

As an encore, he nearly led USF all the way back from a 31-7 deficit in the season finale against UCF, eventually falling 46-39 after putting up 249 total yards and three touchdowns against the 22nd-ranked Knights. I am not linking highlights here because I value your sanity.

After the season, Brown won some hearts in Tampa when stayed at USF during the coaching change to Alex Golesh while other offensive stars entered the portal. He was apparently competing with Bohanon for the starting job throughout the offseason, though it didn’t seem that Bohanon was fully healthy yet, and Brown was officially named QB1 just before the 2023 season started. After a few choppy but promising performances to start the year where he ran the ball excellently but was inconsistent through the air, everything clicked in the Bulls’ fourth game against Rice.

This was an absolute heater of a game from Brown. If you were to rank the best single-game quarterback performances in USF history, a thing that I am definitely going to try to do at some point because I have problems, this one has a genuine argument for the top 10. Entering halftime trailing 14-13, Brown simply could not miss on deep balls in the second half, finding Naiem Simmons again and again and again over the top of the Owls’ secondary en route to a blowout win. He ended up completing 76% of his passes for 435 yards and two touchdowns, and ran for 82 yards and another score. He even converted a two-point conversion on a “Philly special” late in the fourth quarter (a play that USF would eventually use again to great effect against Miami in 2024). Fans who had been holding out hope that Golesh would bring the high-flying Heupel Tennessee passing attack with him were getting their prayers answered.

From there on out, Brown was excellent. He threw for 338 yards and three touchdowns in a win over Navy, torched Memphis on the road for 457 total yards and five touchdowns, and most importantly, led the Bulls to their first bowl game since 2018. It all culminated in a 45-0 torching of alleged power conference program Syracuse in the Boca Raton Bowl, a performance so sublime it made Alex Golesh cuss on national television.

@espn#USF’s head coach after beating #Syracuse 45-0 in their bowl game 🗣️ #cfb #collegefootball #football

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Watching Byrum Brown in 2023 was a delight. At 6’3” and 230 pounds with the ability to throw darts deep down the field and speed that I would describe as “a veritable gallop,” he has a combination of physical tools that I’ve rarely seen at USF. He finished the season as the Bulls’ first-ever 3,000-yard passer, posting a brilliant statline of 64.6% passing for 3,292 yards and 26 touchdowns to 11 interceptions, plus 809 rushing yards and 11 rushing TDs. I’m sure you’ve all heard the stat many times by now, but it bears repeating: Brown was the only quarterback other than Heisman trophy winner and future NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Jayden Daniels to throw for 3,000 yards and rush for 800 yards in 2023. If you waded around in Football Internet for too long in the spring of 2024, you’d see his name pop up in places like “dark horse Heisman contender” lists and NFL draft circles. He deserved every bit of the hype. He entered the 2024 season as the unquestioned star and leader of USF’s offense.

HOW WAS HIS 2024 SEASON? Odd, to put it lightly. That’s no fault of Brown’s, of course. He started the Bulls’ first five games of the season, and while he certainly wasn’t bad, the passing game as a whole just looked much clunkier than it did in 2023. Much of that can probably be attributed to playing Alabama, Miami and Tulane in three of those five games, but still: the offensive line was struggling to protect him, the receivers other than Sean Atkins were struggling to get separation, and Brown wasn’t consistently making throws that he was making in 2023. I’ll have many more words to say about Brown’s 2024 season in our quarterback unit breakdown, but for now, suffice it to say that even when he was on the field, the Bulls’ passing game wasn’t quite humming like fans were used to seeing it hum.

Then, of course, Brown got injured in the second half of the dreadful Tulane blowout and for the remainder of the season was the subject of a strange will-they-won’t-they routine by the USF coaching staff. To summarize as briefly as possible: Brown suffered a brutal-looking lower leg injury in the Tulane game, though the specific type of injury was never disclosed. Alex Golesh spent the rest of the season insisting that Brown was practicing and a game-time decision each week, but he never suited up. Brown did take a few emergency snaps in the Hawaii Bowl in relief of a banged-up Bryce Archie, which prompted a number of questions in the postgame media scrum. Golesh’s answer suggested that Brown broke a bone in his leg in the Tulane game, had been rehabbing valiantly to try to get healthy, and that the indications that he might play during the regular season were 3-D chess moves by the coaching staff trying not to give away gameplan details to opposing defenses.

“He’s a young man that broke a bone in his leg, and has fought like crazy to come back. He’s rehabbed five to six hours a day. He’s continued to come in every day and prepare like a starter. He watches more film than anyone in our program. Continues to lead, continues to work his tail off, and just because on Twitter, somebody doesn’t think that I’m being transparent on his injury? Until the league makes us release some sort of list that says, ‘Man, this guy’s available’ on Tuesday or Wednesday, why would I give anybody an advantage to know when somebody’s available or they’re not? Everybody in the country would tell you the same exact thing.”

Brown’s health and the coaching staff’s closed-doors policy surrounding it unfortunately became the defining storyline of USF’s 2024 season. I think it’s best for everyone’s collective mental health that we not re-litigate the issue here, as devoting any more energy to it feels unfair to one of the best quarterbacks I’ve seen play at USF. He finished the season having completed 59.1% of his passes for 836 yards, two touchdowns, and no interceptions, and ran for 269 yards and three touchdowns.

WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT IN 2025? Full disclosure: I am a huge Byrum Brown fan. His 2023 season is one of my favorite season-long performances that I’ve ever seen from a USF quarterback, and very probably is my favorite in the non-Quinton Flowers division (please calm down, my fellow Olds, I was not around to watch Marquel Blackwell live). USF football was stuck in a deep wilderness before Brown took over: they’d gone 4-29 over the three years of the Jeff Scott era, got left behind in another round of conference realignment, and any possible light at the end of the tunnel felt pretty far away. Brown stepped in and provided a spark at the end of the 2022 season, opted to stick with the program when he certainly would’ve had suitors in the portal, and led the team to a shocking bowl berth and a record-setting offensive season when many of us had already resigned ourselves to a multi-year rebuilding process.

After the 2023 season, I met up for drinks with one of the Bay Area Examiner/Daily Stampede/Voodoo Five founders (one of the architects of the first “Stampeding” series, in fact!) and I asked him, very prematurely, where he thought Brown fell in the all-time ranking of USF quarterbacks. His answer was somewhere around fifth, behind Flowers, Blackwell, Matt Grothe and BJ Daniels, and around the Chad Barnhardt tier. He was very clearly correct, but I was genuinely taken aback by the answer, because I had already mentally slotted him around three, behind just Flowers and Blackwell. I really think he can be that good.

So, what to expect in 2025? This is an absolutely loaded question, and one that will define USF’s season. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’ll have further thoughts on this in our unit breakdown, but here are a few things in which I feel pretty confident:

• Brown is healthy enough to play. Or at least I have no reason to believe otherwise. He was healthy enough to take emergency snaps in the Hawaii Bowl, and while he missed the spring game with a tweaked hamstring, I get the impression that if Alex Golesh could have cancelled the spring game in its entirety, he would have done so with a smile. I’m not reading anything into Brown sitting out. He’s also been throwing as normal in fall practices, so far.
• If he’s healthy, Brown is QB1. I suspect that the BAE-reading audience does not overlap at all with the “there’s a grand government conspiracy to force Alex Golesh to start Bryce Archie until the end of time” crowd, but you can never be too sure.
• Brown is good at quarterback. I’m really bringing the hot takes here, I know. But I think this bears repeating: even if Brown struggles a bit like he did at the start of the 2024 season, he’s still a good QB - especially at the G5 level - and almost undoubtedly USF’s best option at the position. Even when the passing game isn’t clicking, he remains a borderline elite running quarterback; the threat of him running in the backfield is transformative for the entire USF offense.
• Brown is a fantastic face for the program. By all accounts - fans, media, and especially coaches - Brown is an excellent leader, an super-dedicated student of the game, and a delightful personality. USF is fortunate to have him leading the charge again in 2025.

By the way: [football announcer voice] did you know he wants to be dentist?