This off-season, Syracuse football head coach Fran Brown and his top-flight staff have put together a tremendous 2024 recruiting class, both at the high school level and via the transfer portal.
With their recruiting efforts in the portal, Orange coaches have landed a bevy of talented college transfers. Understandably, rising senior quarterback Kyle McCord, a four-star transfer from Ohio State, is grabbing a lot of the national headlines, but there are numerous other transfers into the 'Cuse program who are expected to be huge contributors for Syracuse football in the upcoming 2024 season.
At the top of the list, from my perspective, and echoed by various national analysts, is four-star edge Fadil Diggs, who elected to transfer to the Orange after his junior term at Southeastern Conference member Texas A&M.
MVP 🎯 @fadil_diggs @ZeedHaynes pic.twitter.com/XSQaLMWpse
— Syracuse Football (@CuseFootball) April 24, 2024
The 6-foot-5, 260-pound Diggs, as a senior, should prove one of the leaders for the 'Cuse on the defensive side of the field, and just generally speaking.
His national transfer rankings this off-season are impressive. When I wrote this article, 247Sports placed him at No. 56 overall and No. 7 at edge. The industry-generated On3 Industry Ranking, at the time of this writing, had Diggs at No. 69 overall and No. 9 at edge.
An expert names Syracuse football rising senior edge Fadil Diggs as a top transfer.
In recent days, 247Sports analyst Brad Crawford published a piece where he looked at who he believes at the 50 most impactful transfers to shape the upcoming 2024 campaign. In this article, Crawford rated Diggs at No. 38 overall, writing: "A productive pass rusher in College Station, Diggs now heads to the ACC as a featured threat up front."
Candidly, I was a little surprised that McCord didn't make the cut in Crawford's list of the top-50 most impactful transfers, but the Orange's signal-caller will have every opportunity to showcase his talents on the field in the coming months.
As a junior at Texas A&M in the 2023 season, Diggs tallied 36 total tackles, 22 solo tackles, four sacks and two passes defended.
He was a highly touted prep recruit in the 2020 cycle, rated as four stars and inside the top 200 nationally by several recruiting Web sites. The 2019 Gatorade player of the year in New Jersey, Diggs was a standout at Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, N.J., which is now known as Eastside High School.
Brown and Elijah Robinson, the assistant head coach and defensive coordinator at Syracuse football, are from Camden as well. Multiple 'Cuse coaches, by extension, hail from the Garden State.
Diggs' younger brother is Orange incoming freshman Fatim Diggs, a 2024 three-star linebacker. The 6-foot-2, 215-pound Diggs is out of Eastside High School.
By the way, when I penned this story, the Syracuse football 2024 class, out of the portal, checked in at No. 9 nationally on the On3 Web site and at No. 24 overall via the 247Sports Web site.