How Syracuse’s NIL Collective Has Changed Recruiting

Do you all remember the college football recruiting landscape back in the day?

Before NIL was introduced without restrictions or limitations, recruits (unless you were from Miami or USC) came in for free and paid their dues without compensation for things like endorsement deals.

For college football programs like Syracuse, the late 1980’s, and early 1990’s were a glory age for the program, but recruiting was way different.

New Jersey Pipeline

Before recruiting became a national phenomenon, players in the state of New Jersey would mainly stay closer to home. That allowed Syracuse Football to recruit the four or five-star talent the Garden State could best produce.

Fast forward to 2005, when Syracuse hired the late Greg Robinson as their new head coach to replace long-time head boss Paul Pasqualoni.

Robinson was supposed to be a star recruiter since he was a top Defensive Coordinator for Mack Brown and Texas before arriving at the hill.

That was until he ended up with the worst record as a Syracuse head coach going 10-37 overall (5-37) as he had five wins vacated, and lost his New Jersey recruiting pipeline to Greg Schiano and the upstart Rutgers Scarlet Knights.

How Cuse Has Found a New Way to Recruit in the Garden State

Fast forward to today. Ever since current head coach Dino Babers was hired by the Cuse in Dec. 2015, he made it a priority for Syracuse to go back to its roots and recruit strongly in Jersey again.

The difference now is the talent pool in New Jersey is the strongest it has ever been. Just like in Florida, where there’s an abundance of athletes who go to programs all over the country, even Jersey-born players are recruited by major programs.

Luckily, because of NIL, Syracuse was able to haul in some quality New Jersey talent; including Duce Chestnut (before he transferred to LSU). Chestnut was a coveted four-star prospect who was recruited by big-time programs like Ole Miss.

With Cuse being NIL heavily involved, they were able to steal him to come to Cuse. He was named a freshman All-American selection and looked like one after 2022.

The turn-over machine would be a top draft prospect at cornerback, but shockingly, he put his name into the transfer portal. To no one’s surprise, Chestnut would transfer to LSU (known by college football as DBU).

16 Commits in June 2023

After a ho-hum, but productive 2023 recruiting class that had a record number of JUCO commits in it, the football program started going to work for 2024.

After a slow recruiting period from January to May, something magical happened in June to Syracuse’s next recruiting class.

Syracuse fans who have been around long enough started to notice that every day, someone was committing to Cuse via Twitter alerts.

The class kept growing and growing, and just like that, they grabbed 16 commits in just one month for the 2024 recruiting class.

How was Syracuse able to grab all these commits so fast? NIL definitely ties into this as Syracuse had smaller, and non-profit NIL collectives such as the 315 Foundation and Athletes who Care help pitch in to this.

The question was, after their biggest celebrity donor, Adam Weitsman left the program, how could Syracuse still compete with the top fruit in NIL? That story is a big one to tell.

18 Commits Now/Orange United

On Sep. 18, 2023, it was out in the media that the Orange had taken a huge step towards a major NIL collective that would help Syracuse in not just football, but for all the Olympic sports as well.

The Orange officially introduced “Orange United”, a commercialized NIL effort that includes anybody who’s anybody whether it’s wealthy donors or board members.

Even fans can donate money to help boost football and other sport’s recruiting efforts on a national scale.

How Orange United Affects Syracuse Football Recruiting Moving Forward

As of right now, Syracuse Football has 18 commits in the 2024 class.

Now they can really make noise in the national recruiting game for both 2024 and even 2025 thanks to this new and hopefully revolutionizing NIL collective in order for Cuse athletics to go from relevancy to championship caliber.

“It’s 2023,” said SU athletic director John Wildhack. “This is collegiate athletics, and if you’re gonna compete at the highest level, which is what we want to do, you need to have a good NIL program.”

Indeed you do Mr. Wildhack. You have already made some great strides with SU football by hiring Coach Babers in 2016, but if this pans out like we think it will, this will be your greatest accomplishment yet as SU’s Athletic Director.

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