College football has a new signing period this year before the traditional National Signing Day on the first Wednesday in February. Starting on Dec. 20 and running for 72 hours, class of 2018 prospects will be able to put pen to paper with college teams — making their commitments binding and formally ending their recruitment.
Should college football’s new early signing day be even sooner? Big 12 commish thinks so
This year’s early signing period is December, but it’s not clear how the calendar will set up after that.
One of the sport’s most powerful men thinks there should be an even earlier chance for players to sign. That’s Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who represents the Power 5 conferences on the NCAA’s legislative Division I council. To hear Bowlsby speak at Big 12 Media Days on Monday, he isn’t a fan of a Signing Day in general.
“I’m not sure that a signing date is exactly what we need in today’s environment,” he told media members. “I have asked coaches, athletic directors, conference commissioners repeatedly over the last 12 months why we have a signing date. It seems to me that, if we have 70 percent of the student-athletes, the prospects that want to commit relatively early, that one date is not all that important. The only answer I’ve ever gotten is ‘because we’ve always had a signing date.’”
Bowlsby suggested players should be allowed to sign in the late spring.
“I think you could end up with a signing window, where you would say, ‘OK, we’re going to do visits in April, May, and June, we’re gonna go to camp,’” he said, referencing the on-camps teams hold for high school players during those months .
“If you wanna get the recruiting process over, the institution can issue a letter of intent. You’ve got 14 days to sign it. And maybe the window runs from Oct. 1 to Nov. 15, or maybe it runs from Sept. 1 to Nov. 1, and you get it over before the postseason. I don’t know why there can’t be a window where you offer the scholarship. If the student-athlete wants to conclude the recruitment process and the institution knows they’d like to make a decision, they go ahead and do it.”
Bowlsby said he’s heard a statistic that the average FBS team issues 233 verbal scholarship offers in a given year. I can’t say if that’s correct, but it definitely sounds correct. Signing class sizes max out around 25, and there’s no question that teams offer scholarships to many times more players than they have slots. That leads to a culture where there are “real” scholarship offers and others that aren’t “committable.”
After this year, we’ll get a better sense of how early signing days work.
Technically, college football already has a signing “period.” That first Wednesday in February, Signing Day, is when most uncommitted prospects sign. The signing period for a National Letter of Intent runs until April 1, but only a few prospects wait much beyond Signing Day every year, because classes fill up.
This December’s signing period nominally carries a tighter timeline of three days, and we don’t know for sure how many players will participate. It’ll probably be popular for early enrollees, who until now have been the only players able to sign financial-aid agreements before Signing Day. If there’s a rush among 2018 prospects to sign in December, the sport’s decision-makers might want to go further. But if a strong majority of players decides to hang back until February, maybe they won’t.
If players could sign in the spring, they’d get the benefit of absolute certainty, with offers that couldn’t be pulled out from under them at the 11th hour. They’d also risk signing with a school whose coaching staff gets fired after the following season. That’s a concern that likely won’t come into play for December signees.
It’s hard to get reforms like these passed. Bowlsby said it was a struggle to get majority to support even the December period. This idea’s worth discussing, but it’ll be hard to evaluate until this December has come and gone.
