Two weeks ago, Fran Brown said he was comfortable with his roster and didn’t need to add anyone through the new fifth-year eligibility ruling. This week, he’s actively trying to get one specific player back.
That player is Justus Ross-Simmons, and the reversal says everything about how thin Syracuse’s receiver room actually is heading into the season. Ross-Simmons is slated to rejoin practice today.
“Just in the process of just trying to see what’s the best thing to help out with our football team overall,” Brown said when asked about the situation. “It’s got to be an academic student-athlete. So the student piece has to go together and athletic part. So we’re just seeing, just wearing our options out to see if that would be something that we should do.”
Asked directly what changed his mind after saying just last week he wasn’t interested, Brown didn’t hesitate to credit his own locker room.
“Our team just, the team just, communicate and things of that nature,” Brown said. “Anything that come from the team. I already had told you I didn’t want to do that. And then after listening to our team and just going through stuff and just weighing options and seeing if that’ll work.” Seems like Coach Brown heard from his captains, and specifically his quarterback, about bringing Ross-Simmons back.
“Steve (Angeli) called and asked if I was willing to come back and do whatever I could to help the team,” Ross-Simmons said. “We both got hurt last year. He asked me to come back and finish what we started.”
Ross-Simmons was out of eligibility after the 2025 season and had already begun NFL training following a high-ankle sprain that limited him to eight games. Then the fifth-year eligibility injunction out of Colorado opened a door nobody expected. If it holds, and it’s still winding through the Tenth Circuit right now, Ross-Simmons would be eligible to suit up for Syracuse again in 2026.
The roster math explains why Brown’s tune changed so fast, and credit Brown for being flexible enough to listen to his team leaders. Ross-Simmons ranked fourth on the team in receiving yards last season and tied for the team lead in touchdowns. Without him, Syracuse wouldn’t return any of its top seven receivers from a year ago, an almost impossible gap to fill for any program, let alone one with a starting quarterback coming off a torn Achilles.
Brown made clear this isn’t a formality yet. “We just got to make sure everything matches up the right way,” he said. “Student-athlete first, and to make sure that the student part of help, and then athletic part, we already know what he could do athletically.”
He also addressed where Ross-Simmons stands physically after months away from the team facility. “He looked good,” Brown said. “So I mean he’s a wide out, he going to look better than me. Should be straight and a lot better than me.”
This is bigger than one roster spot. It’s a live example of exactly the chaos the fifth-year eligibility litigation has created across college football, the same fight that’s currently determining Amarri Monroe’s status on the basketball side. Programs built their rosters around one understanding of who was eligible, then had that understanding rewritten by a federal courtroom in Colorado weeks before the season starts. Brown said no to adding a player under that new reality. Then his own locker room, and the reality of an almost entirely inexperienced receiver room, changed his mind.
Syracuse opens the season September 5th. Whether Ross-Simmons is catching passes that day may come down to paperwork and a courtroom in Colorado just as much as anything happening at practice.
