Let’s talk about the spike, even though Kyle McCord wants to move past it. The spike is the core of who McCord is now at Syracuse: himself. Not a picture of who Kyle McCord should be. Not a picture of what his coaches expect of him. Kyle McCord plays fast and free, and all the emotions that he played with as a little leaguer have come out.

Like the spike. It happened two Saturdays ago against Georgia Tech. Third-and-2 in the third quarter. Syracuse is up 24-14 at its own 16-yard line. McCord takes the snap and is chased out of the pocket. He runs left toward the sideline and tiptoes down the field as a Georgia Tech defender tries to grab him from behind.

McCord loses his balance and, as he goes out of bounds, smashes the ball — partly out of anger because he thought he could have gotten more yards, partly out of excitement because while he may not be a “mobile quarterback” exactly, he can definitely get big yards with his legs when he needs to. The crowd rose to its feet and roared in approval. On the sideline itself, Syracuse safety Justin Barron began jumping up and down and high stepping toward McCord.

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Kyle Mccord bypasses defense for 15-yard rush

Kyle Mccord bypasses defense for 15-yard rush

Up in the press box, quarterbacks coach Nunzio Campanile scanned the field for flags, expecting to be given a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. It didn’t come. “I don’t think he’ll do that again, but I also think it’s fired up our guys,” Campanile said.

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

Syracuse is 2-0 entering 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 against one interception and is completing 69 percent of his passes. Two games is a small sample size, but McCord told ESPN in a recent interview that he’s having more fun now than at any time in his college career.

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

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

The two had known each other since youth football. According to the story, 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 chief certified nurse anesthetist. Teara Brown called her husband, Fran, who was an assistant coach at Temple at the time.

Derek McCord played for Rutgers and knew Fran, who was from Camden, New Jersey, about a half-hour drive 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 thus began a casual relationship that, as fate would have it, brought them back together this past December.

After one season as a starter at Ohio State, McCord went on the transfer market. McCord had a very successful season with the Buckeyes by any standard, throwing for 3,170 yards — the seventh-highest single-season total in school history — while completing 66 percent of his passes and throwing for 24 touchdowns.

But when Ohio State loses to Michigan, as it did last year, 30-24, sometimes stat lines are meaningless. McCord was told it was best to move on, and he did, with his head held high. He had plenty of suitors, but the first was Brown.

The Syracuse coach initially expected skepticism. Brown is a first-time head coach and previously coached defensive backs at Georgia. He was trying to recruit one of the nation’s top quarterbacks to a school that last won a true conference title in 1998.

But Brown also knew he had a connection to Jersey and that he believed wholeheartedly 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 NIL money as anybody else. I’m not going to have all that 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 have 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 back home didn’t stop at Brown. McCord knew offensive coordinator Jeff Nixon from youth soccer. Derek McCord coached Kyle and Jeff’s son Will on the same youth soccer team for three years, starting when Kyle was 5 and Will was 6. Will Nixon eventually transferred to Syracuse as well.

Brown also retained Campanile, moving him from tight ends coach to quarterbacks coach. Campanile coached New Jersey high school football for nearly two decades — including Matt Simms, who eventually teamed up with Kyle McCord as a private coach.

From the moment McCord arrived on campus in January, he felt at home. Not only because he was surrounded by so many people from his youth, but also because they all trusted him to go out there and be Little League Kyle again. Brown told him, “I’m the head coach of the football team. You’re second in command.”

“He’s behind me 100 percent,” McCord said. “When you know your head coach feels that way about you, you can just go out there, play freely and have fun. A lot of guys on the team feel that way.”

Syracuse has indeed taken on the personalities of its two leaders: tireless workers, fiercely competitive, tough guys from Jersey, in some ways overlooked. But perhaps most of all, Brown and McCord know how to make the people around them believe.

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

McCord spent hours going over the playbook, familiarizing himself with the system Nixon brought over from the NFL so that playing would become second nature. He spent hours getting to know and work with his receivers and tight ends, not only building the right chemistry with them, but making sure they were just as invested in learning the playbook as he was.

It helped that Syracuse returned one of the nation’s best hybrid tight end/receivers in 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 one game last season, and Syracuse signed Zeed Haynes and Jackson Meeks through the ESRB.

The relationship with Campanile blossomed as well. If Campanile had a correction on footwork or technique, McCord understood it right away because he had learned it from Simms. Nixon made sure McCord was included in meetings to discuss the offense, what he liked, what he thought he and the receivers could do well, which helped build a bond that got them both on the same page.

Those meetings happen every Thursday during game week. And they appear to be effective: Syracuse ranks No. 3 in the ACC in offense, No. 2 in passing offense and McCord is No. 1 in passing yards per game.

“The shots he makes, he throws the ball on time and plays with an aggressiveness that you really have to feel comfortable with yourself and confident in your performance to be able to hit the ball like he’s done in these first few games,” Campanile said. “That’s the guy we thought we were getting.”

McCord points to his relationship with Nixon as a reason for this. He said that in the first two games, he wanted to make a specific play between 10 and 15 times in a crucial situation that Nixon ultimately calls into his helmet.

“That way you know you’re on the same page as the offensive coordinator and you see it the same way and you feel the same way about the game,” McCord said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to do, to get to a point where I had a sense of what he was going to say and why he was going to say it.”

It was especially satisfying for Derek McCord to see his son playing with fire and determination again, and doing so with Brown.

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

Especially when you consider how many Portal players have seamlessly integrated with the likes of Gadsden, LeQuint Allen, Pena and the returners on the offensive line. It feels like they’ve been playing together for years, not just two games. Campanile and Brown say it all comes back to McCord and the way he worked in the offseason to make sure the rhythm and chemistry was there from the start.

“If he continues to play like this, which I really believe, everyone will see that he has always been this player,” Campanile said. “He should have just been given the chance and put in a situation where everyone believes in him completely. Everyone here certainly believes in him.”

Kyle McCord says the Syracuse offense hasn’t even “scratched the surface” yet. There are bigger tests to come. But the feeling he has — having his old friend Will Nixon next to him, Jeff Nixon calling plays, Brown and Campanile urging him to just be himself, play with emotion and everything will fall into place — is ultimately why he came to Syracuse.

So it’s hard to blame him when he goes berserk after a big play. The spikes? Maybe he should save those for the practice field.

“I don’t know if it’s the right way to reintroduce myself, but I definitely feel like I’m playing with a chip on my shoulder given the way everything played out last year,” McCord said.

“I think a lot of people thought my motivation would be to prove people wrong. But really it was just to prove myself right.”