Syracuse coach Fran Brown doesn’t sugarcoat the chaos of college football’s transfer portal — and he isn’t shy about letting it get personal. On a recent appearance on the “I AM ATHLETE” podcast, Brown issued a blunt warning to those trying to poach his players: cross certain lines and he’s coming for you himself.
“I don’t even care,” Brown said. “Dudes be trying to push up on my wife. She’s bad. She don’t even got to tell me. … It’s just the game, it’s what they do. For me, I don’t care, but don’t let me find out and then I see you. Cause I ain’t no b—-.”
After Brown’s first season at Syracuse in 2024, the program lost 24 players to the transfer portal, including four that started at least six games last season. One high-profile departure was wide receiver Trebor Peña, who requested an NIL deal reportedly worth $2 million that Brown refused. Pena eventually transferred to Penn State.
That departure in particular showed just how messy the transfer portal can get.
“If they came and they did it illegally and I find out, I’m not gonna go tell on you,” Brown said. “But I’m gonna come at you like ‘What’s up?’ I’m gonna see you. There’s a couple of dudes I called and they tried [to say] ‘Hey, lose my line’. Like man, shut up.”
Brown framed the issue as more than just losing talent but rather one of respect and accountability within the program, especially when outside programs try to exploit players for their own gain.
“They don’t live by [principles] because they’re doing whatever it takes to impress somebody else,” Brown said of other coaches. “They’ll even bite their own people back out just to go impress somebody else, just to move up one spot. Not knowing at some point I could be the guy calling the shot where you could have been at, but you wanted to go kick different backs in just to move up a little bit more.
“But for me, I’m just gonna come at ’em,” Brown continued. “But I ain’t hitting them up. You in the portal, then I’m gonna talk to you. You’re not in the portal? I ain’t doing that. For me, they’re going to try to make an example. And I’m not about to be the example of somebody talking to somebody in the portal. I ain’t doing all that.”
Through the roster shakeup that included adding 16 transfers, Syracuse has managed a 2-1 start to the 2025 season and now heads to Clemson on Saturday.
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