DECISION DAY DEBATE
Coaches and others discuss the pros and cons of establishing an early signing period and offer tips for helping players during the recruiting process.
By Nate Dougherty
Nate Dougherty is a former Assistant Editor at Coaching Management.
When he was a standout high school quarterback in 1980, Todd Dodge didn’t face much of a recruiting crush. In fact, the busiest period was the last month before the February signing day, even though Dodge was one of the nation’s top prospects.
Now, a generation later, as Head Coach at the University of North Texas and father of a top high school quarterback, Dodge is witnessing an entirely different recruiting game. Like many highly sought after players, Riley Dodge made an early commitment shortly after his junior year at Southlake (Texas) Carroll High School. He later changed his mind and decided to follow his father to North Texas.
“A lot more players are committing at earlier ages, and players and parents are much more aware of the recruiting process,” says Dodge, who was 98-11 as Head Coach at Southlake Carroll before taking the North Texas job in December 2006. “As long as Internet sites are putting out rankings for the projected class of 2010, you’ll have people talking about it and paying attention to those young players.”
A cottage industry has been built around college football recruiting. Scores of Web sites track every change of thought in 16- and 17-year-olds’ minds. Even mainstream media outlets have gotten into the act with many newspapers covering recruiting as if it were its own sport. With all this attention, athletes begin to think they’ll miss out if they don’t commit early, and early commitments become as much about ego and prestige as actual future plans.
The underlying problem is that early commitments carry no real weight. Until a National Letter of Intent is signed, there is nothing binding a player to a school or vice-versa, other than the word of the athlete and coach. As such, it’s not uncommon for athletes to commit to several different schools, and sometimes (though less frequently) for coaches to pull back scholarship offers, leaving the athlete scrambling for a replacement.
To address this acceleration of the recruiting process and alleviate the pressures on both student-athletes and their future coaching staffs, many coaches and administrators believe football should institute an early signing day for National Letters of Intent. This would allow athletes to make a binding commitment before the current February signing date and put the recruiting process behind them, possibly even before they begin their final season of high school football. But the idea is a contentious one, with strong beliefs held on both sides, and even supporters of an early signing period disagree on when one should be held.
“An early signing date is definitely a possibility, but even in our conference where most schools support it, we don’t have a consensus on when it should be,” Dodge says. “It seems pretty much split down the middle right now.”
An Early Solution
The prospect of an early signing date has been floating around for more than two decades, but it appears to be gaining new traction as coaches and administrators search for ways to counter ever-escalating recruiting pressure. At their annual spring meeting, football coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference asked league leadership to develop a proposal for an early signing date, an idea that’s also supported by the Big 12 Conference. For a change to occur, it must be passed by the Collegiate Commissioners Association, the group which administers the National Letter of Intent. But the commissioners have shown no inclination to implement an early signing day on their own, leaving it to football coaches to push for one.
“Up until this point, the National Letter of Intent has not had to deal with the issue of an early signing date because it has not come before the steering committee,” says Mike Slive, Commissioner of the Southeastern Conference and chair of the National Letter of Intent steering committee. “Coaches can make recommendations for date changes, as can others. This happens all the time and the NLI’s policies have evolved over the years because of those recommendations.”
Jack Cosgrove, Head Coach at the University of Maine, says letting student-athletes sign with schools earlier than February of their senior year would help alleviate pressure they face from recruiters and allow them to focus on their high school studies and teams. And with so many players making early verbal commitments anyway, he says giving these commitments official standing wouldn’t change much of anything.
“What we have now is essentially an early signing period, just not a binding one,” Cosgrove says. “But having an official early signing day would at least reduce the number of commitments that aren’t honored by one side or the other.
“Now, if you’re a 16-year-old kid and a coach keeps calling and contacting you even though you’ve made a commitment, how do you say no?” Cosgrove continues. “An early signing period would allow an athlete to make a formal commitment and avoid the coaches who continue to pursue someone who’s made a verbal commitment somewhere, but hasn’t signed.”
As the National Recruiting Editor for Scout.com and founder of SuperPrep magazine, Allen Wallace follows the decisions made by countless recruits each season, and he’s seen the same situation play out each year. A good-but-not-great student-athlete generates buzz from mid-major programs early in the process, but decides to test the waters, hoping for offers from larger schools. When they don’t come, his position with the mid-majors may be gone, leaving him empty-handed. Wallace believes an early signing date would allow these athletes to avoid the guessing game.
“We have to focus on what’s best for the student-athletes, because that’s what it should all be about,” Wallace says. “They’re the ones who need someone to look out for them. That’s why an early signing period would be a great help, especially to the borderline kids who are unsure about whether they’ll get a lot more offers. It’s sad when they could’ve signed in the summer and been guaranteed a spot somewhere, but instead got some bad advice and waited for offers that didn’t come.”
Dodge says an initial signing date in late summer would be ideal. “The recruiting process seems like a lot of glitz and glamour, but some players—like my son—just want to get it done with,” he says. “And at mid-major schools where we might put a lot of time and effort into recruiting a player, early signings would give us the last three or four months of the process to spend our time and money more wisely rather than trying to keep on a kid who may leave for a bigger school anyway.”
Wallace agrees that perhaps the biggest beneficiary would be smaller schools in danger of losing recruits to bigger-name schools late in the process. “Some schools, especially those with a reputation for being top-tier programs, want to be able to swoop in when they need a prospect and maybe turn a kid’s head,” Wallace says. “If an athlete is swept off his feet during an early signing period and signs with a good mid-major program, those big-name schools can no longer go in and change the player’s mind.”
Against Opposition
If an early signing date were instituted, it would first have to overcome strong opposition from coaches who believe it would create more work for them while affording less time to evaluate potential recruits. This May, coaches in the SEC voted 9-3 against recommending an early signing day, and Pac-10 Conference coaches turned down the idea by a 9-1 vote.
Slive says there is concern that with less time to judge a student-athlete’s character and commitment in the classroom, an early signing day could lock in players who are not a good fit for their new school. “Our coaches in the SEC are not in favor of an early signing date because the majority feel they need that extra time,” Slive says. “The more an institution knows about a young man’s academic record and his character, the better a decision can be made by the coach, the institution, and the prospect. One thing delaying the decision process does is provide more academic records for the coach, as well as more time to evaluate whether he’ll fit in well at the institution.”
Ed Orgeron, Head Coach at the University of Mississippi, says he loves the recruiting process and wants the chance to spend as much time as possible evaluating a recruit’s academic record and character. He worries that moving the signing date up from February would force coaches to take focus away from their own teams to make sure they sign players early.
“An early signing date would require a tremendous amount of manpower,” Orgeron says. “In-season official visits are limited and you’d have to get a lot of them done during the season, which would take away from game prep time. If the date is in December, everyone will have to go all out to keep recruits while also possibly getting ready for a bowl game, and coaching staffs just don’t have the resources to do all that.”
There’s also debate about whether an early signing date would really change the recruiting process. “There’s concern that it would simply push everything forward,” says Grant Teaff, Executive Director of the American Football Coaches Association. “Coaches who have put a lot of thought into it say if we have an early signing date, that just becomes the new signing date, and a lot of them are queasy about pushing that up.”
Backing Off
With such a wide range of opinions about the need for or benefit of an early signing date, it’s unlikely that a consensus will emerge quickly. “In all the time we’ve been dealing with the concept of an early signing period, we’ve never been able to get a majority of coaches behind it,” Teaff says. “Last year, when the NCAA studied this issue, they found that even those in favor of an early signing date couldn’t agree on when it should be. It seems to me that we’re not going to have a consensus anytime in the foreseeable future.”
While some coaches and conferences would prefer an early signing period in the winter—the ACC proposal called for a December date—others prefer summer, before football season begins. With that and other hurdles yet to be passed, many coaches feel something else needs to be done to stem the tide of pressure on today’s student-athletes. Cosgrove believes as younger and younger players feel pressured to choose a school, it will inevitably lead to more problems unless coaches agree to back off.
“Some programs are taking a much more aggressive approach at an earlier point in young men’s lives,” Cosgrove says. “It would benefit everyone if all that wasn’t happening. Certain schools have their entire class signed by the time the contact period starts and then they’re out recruiting juniors.
“As coaches, if we don’t institute an early signing day, we at least need to back off in how early we approach these players,” he continues. “Many of them simply are not ready to make a decision of that magnitude.”
Though Dodge says only the nation’s top prospects receive such heavy attention from the time they’re underclassmen, more players are coming to believe that level of attention is the norm. “There’s a lot of anxiety for players and their parents when they don’t have an offer before their senior year,” Dodge says. “I feel like we all need to explain to these athletes and their families that the majority of recruiting is done the old-fashioned way. We should encourage those kids to keep working hard and have a good senior year.
“Some of these players may be on a team where four or five guys go on to play in Division I, and three of them have multiple offers before their senior year,” he continues. “Other players start to think that’s just how the process works, and we need to explain that probably 70 percent of people who end up signing don’t commit early or receive an offer from the school they eventually choose until after their senior year starts.”
When he coached at Southlake Carroll, Dodge encouraged his players to take their time in the recruiting process and use their college visits, but to commit as soon as they were sure they had found the right school. “I would tell them to visit the campus and list the pros and cons so if they were to blow out their knee the first day of practice, they’d still end up with a degree that benefits them and be in a town they enjoy,” Dodge says. “As soon as they came to a decision along with their parents, I encouraged them to commit. It took a lot off their plate senior year and helped guarantee them a college education, because most schools will honor a commitment even if the player gets injured.”
To help his players handle the attention of the recruiting process, Mark Crabtree, Head Coach at Dublin (Ohio) Coffman High School, makes sure they have others around who will help them make wise decisions. And he tries to keep them out of the process entirely while they’re still underclassmen.
“When I have a player being recruited, I take a proactive approach and try to get the family involved, because I know they’ll be able to do a better job for that athlete than I can,” he says. “But I don’t like to even get a player involved until he’s a junior. When he’s done with his junior season, I’ll have him make his highlight film and mail it out. Regardless of what people say, after junior year is not too late to get things started.”
For their part, Orgeron says college coaches should try to focus on the positive side of recruiting rather than viewing it simply as an arms race. “Recruiting is a great part of college football, and one of the parts I enjoy most,” he says. “It keeps us connected to high school students and gives student-athletes a chance to visit college campuses. Recruiting today is so much different than when I grew up, but nearly all of it is still positive. We need to remember that the point is to give high school athletes an opportunity to get a good education.”
