The signing of the National Letter of Intent has become a celebratory occasion in America’s high schools, but the NLI has several issues that many recruits aren’t warned about. Moreover, the recruiting process and the NCAA can make things difficult on recruits in an effort to keep the business of college sports as coach-friendly and profitable as possible.
5 things college football recruits should know before they sign
National Signing Day has a few issues that prospects should be aware of.
Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports
So here are five things every recruit should know before they sign to play in college.
1. Blue chips should consider not signing.
Many recruits don’t know it, since the NLI has become such a part of National Signing Day — I mean, it’s called “Signing Day,” indicating that the point is to sign — but recruits don’t actually have to sign in order to play college sports.
The NLI is not a financial aid agreement. It does not guarantee anyone a spot on a team. It simply binds players to schools so coaches can ensure that they will have the right number of scholarship players for the next season.
This is a bad deal for athletes, but most have to sign. If a three-star player refused to sign his NLI, the school that player was verbally committed to would just find someone comparable who would.
The only recruits who really don’t need to sign NLIs are five-stars, whom teams will take no matter what. And given how much those players can be screwed over by signing NLIs, they really shouldn’t go through with it, and instead just enroll in the summer or fall. Or at least they should take some advice from former Kansas basketball star Andrew Wiggins and wait a lot longer until they do.
2. Every coach is a businessman.
The day after Signing Day is customarily the day when many assistant coaches leave for other jobs. They wait until they’ve locked up a recruiting class for their schools, and since those players are bound because they signed, a coach can leave and not worry that his former co-workers will lose their recruits.
The system is not fair. Coaches are allowed to leave with no penalty, but athletes who sign their NLIs have to sit out for a year if they also leave due to a surprise management change. This, as Jim Harbaugh subtweeted, is pure deception.
Thought of the day - What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! - Sir Walter Scott
— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) February 7, 2015 One of the most high-profile cases this year involved Ohio State and Michigan, as star running back recruit Mike Weber chose the Buckeyes over the Wolverines on Signing Day. However, OSU running backs coach Stan Drayton left for the Chicago Bears right after Weber signed, prompting Weber and his high school coach to speak out.
This deception is not changing, because if the NCAA allows athletes the same freedom as coaches, it would be admitting that recruits commit to coaches, not just schools. That would damage the association’s legal arguments, even if the prudent practice is to commit to a school and not a coach.
3. Try to have a backup plan.
Recruits know they can break verbal commitments and re-open their recruiting. But a verbal commitment can also be used as a placeholder by a coach who leads a prospect to believe he has a spot on the team, until that coach finds someone better. Or, the recruit who expected to enroll in time to play as a freshman can be asked to enroll later, spending a year away from the team; this is called grayshirting.
The most recent instance of this practice played out at Louisville this recruiting cycle. Three-star running back Matt Coburn had been committed to the Cardinals for eight months, but was told two days before Signing Day that he would only have a scholarship if he agreed to grayshirt, because coach Bobby Petrino wanted to sign more defensive backs instead.
This news comes out of multiple schools every year. It’s even more frequent than it seems, since it sometimes doesn’t make headlines.
There is no penalty for the tactic — other than, for example, Petrino being banned from recruiting at Coburn's school — because the NCAA does not recognize verbal commitments. Since Louisville could not acknowledge that it had offered Coburn a scholarship in the first place, there was never any agreement in place in the mind of the NCAA.
Based on that, recruits should remain in contact with other schools up until Signing Day, even though the recruiting process can be time-consuming.
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4. Don’t expect things to change during your four years.
The Ed O’Bannon case, which aimed to give athletes a bit of the NCAA’s billions of dollars of revenue, resulted in the possibility of athletes being paid a maximum of $5,000 per year. That is affordable for every power-conference school, but the NCAA could end up spending $50 million in attorney’s fees to fight it. And that’s just the first court case, with more high-profile cases to come.
The association also spent $580,000 on lobbying in 2014 — three times more than it had ever spent before — as it attempts to gain support in Congress to keep athletes down, both in the decision-making process and economically.
So while things are improving, no athlete should be under the impression that anything beyond enhanced scholarships and other basics reforms are in the works.
5. Once you’re in, your coach can take your scholarship.
The NCAA recently passed a rule that athletes cannot lose their scholarships for on-field performance. However, players can still be kicked off their teams for “violating team rules,” which can include any number of reasons, legit or otherwise.
Three Alabama players claim they lost scholarships for “violating team rules,” when they actually didn’t meet athletic expectations. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney kicked a player off the team for having a bad attitude. Coaches have the ability to revoke scholarships one way or another, knowing athletes aren’t likely to win any sort of legal battle against schools.
