Syracuse football: Orange have a monumental weekend of official visits ahead

Fran Brown is swinging for the fences

A lot has changed in the week and change since Fran Brown was announced as the head coach of the Syracuse Orange. The new man in charge has also ushered some new coaches, new staff and now of course, new recruits. Brown was known as an ace recruiter, as is his new defensive coordinator, Elijah Robinson, so it’s no surprise that the pair are immediately hitting it hard and have a budding list of offers as well as official visits starting to pop up.

(Ed. note: It became official that Khalil Ahmad is returning to Syracuse from Penn State to add even more recruiting firepower to the staff)

These targets are a mix of folks that the new staff has been working with in their previous stops at Georgia and Texas A&M, as well as some transfers that they had been working with previously. They also will need to reevaluate and retain those recruits committed under the Babers tenure that they feel can fit their new system and roster needs. One overlooked part of this process in the world of transfer portal shenanigans is the fact that Brown had to re-recruit his entire team. During an interview last week it was mentioned that he had planned to have sit downs with every member of the team by early this week to work on that process.

This weekend however, the official visits start in earnest. There have been at least six that have been publicly announced via recruits social media or otherwise confirmed to be heading to campus, including the following:

• Koy Beasley, DB, 4-Star Purdue Commit
• Emanuel Ross, WR, 4-Star Stanford Commit
• KingJoseph Edwards, Edge, 4-Star Uncommitted
• Marcellus Barnes Jr., CB, 4-Star Uncommitted
• Jaylan Hornsby, WR, 3-Star Uncommitted
• Yasin Willis, RB, 3-Star Pitt Commit
• Josh Philostin, CB, 3-Star Indiana Commit
• Whit Muschamp, QB, 3-Star Vanderbilt Commit
• Cole Snyder, QB, 3-Star Buffalo Transfer (former Rutgers)

There has been an ever-increasing flurry of activity on this front over the last week, so if I missed anyone, apologies and we’ll continue to update if new information has come in. In the meantime, you can see Coach Fran is already busy hitting up New Jersey:

The Orange also has seen a limited number of decommits over the course of the coaching change. Always understandable, as part of what you are committing to with a school is the personnel you’re working with. At this point, the brothers Trashon and Tavon Dye, as well as Zekai Wimberly and Clinton Robinson have announced that they will be re-opening their recruitment.

Also for reference, I’ve thrown together a spreadsheet, because why not. I will continue to update it as we see more info come in, but rankings listed are based off 247sports.com recruiting composites from when the player was a recruit. I still need to find a good way to differentiate, but this also includes players who have entered the portal from staff’s previous schools, who have a positional or recruiting tie to the new staff (i.e. defensive linemen transferring from TAMU).