Syracuse men’s basketball: landing Kiyan Anthony goes beyond the player and on-court product for the Orange

At a time when the program is looking to return to the spotlight, recruiting success is helping in more ways than one.

Syracuse Orange fans had to sweat out some close wins this past weekend, as the football team defeated the Golden Bears agenda and men’s basketball survived Youngstown State in double overtime. Just before all that insanity played out, Orange fans received some much anticipated and relieving news about one of the highest profile recruits in the country.

Kiyan Anthony, the son of Syracuse MBB legend Carmelo Anthony, finalized his commitment to join the Orange starting in the 2025-26 season. Anthony ranks as a consensus top-50 class of 2025 prospect and joins a loaded recruitment class coming in next year.

Many fans will point to Anthony picking the Orange being great for a bunch of reasons, namely the Syracuse legacy he can follow with his dad or how good of a prospect he is in the context of his class. Take a step back, however, and there is a bigger, broader and important narrative at play: getting Kiyan does more for the Orange and SU Athletics than just having him on the team or seeing if his potential can be fully unlocked.

One critical point that has to be addressed right off the bat is with Syracuse men’s basketball recruitment and contextualize just how successful the program has been these past two years under coach Adrian Autry compared to the final portion of Jim Boeheim’s long tenure with the team.

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What the numbers show isn’t just a jump, but a huge leap in the rankings if you just look at the past 15 years of recruiting:

At least on paper, Syracuse’s recruiting numbers after two years with Autry are the program’s best in close to a decade. The important factor to consider is the high end talent the Orange are now adding, something the team was not doing at least since 2015 to 2016 range (8th- and 18th-best classes, respectively). That’s the last time Syracuse netted consecutive top-35 recruitment classes.

That turnaround matters for a handful of reasons. It proves that at least some percentage of recruits, and specifically the higher-end talent with potential, sees Syracuse as a landing zone to start (and hopefully finish) their collegiate basketball careers. It shows Autry and company acknowledged and adapted to some of the limitations that manifested during the very end of Boeheim’s time (writer’s note: no disrespect to coach JAB whatsoever). To put some icing on the cake, this success is also coming in an era where so much has changed in college hoops and the college athletics world, it’s a pretty great starting point for what Autry is building.

Recruitment isn’t the be-all and end-all to be successful in the 2020s. Any team can put aside x number of dollars for somebody in the transfer portal, for example. But it does matter for brand purposes. Syracuse still needs to at least be in the conversation for some of these top players or high-profile recruits. There is clearly a gap between programs who do that and the ones who do not.

That success eventually brings fans, media attention and exposure all together. And again, zooming out to the bigger picture is the Syracuse program is one that has had tons of previous success, but is clearly not where it was compared to a decade ago. To an extent, there is some optimism being generated just for bringing in prospects like the ones Autry has for the 2024 and 2025 classes.

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Taking things even one step further back, you can already see how much the wins on the recruitment trail can do for a team. Just ask Fran Brown and Syracuse football, who likewise are clearly a tier or two higher in recruitment success compared to before. Credits to Tim Leonard who compiled all the data for football and men’s basketball below:

Syracuse men’s basketball still remains at a point of rebuilding what there once was and getting to a level of success many fans like myself grew up on. Even with all the changes both with the program recently and the college athletics world, recruitment remains a defining factor in “who matters” — which teams get talked about the most, which schools have their name acknowledged at a higher frequency and who can end up with the biggest possible slice in the pie.

The on-court results will eventually need to come. After all, hope can only take a program’s direction so far. With that said, this is still a big step in the right direction for the Orange who… couldn’t really make those steps for a while.

Netting Anthony to that highly-ranked 2025 class is a big deal, but it’s more than just because it’s Carmelo’s kid or the potential he could have playing in front of 20,000 fans in the Dome. It’s a significant step in the right direction fans wanted to see and really needed to see.

The future will still be uncertain with how the Orange will perform going forward, but the outlook certainly feels just a tad more reassuring with where the program is headed.