The new signing period in college football, which was enacted Monday by the Collegiate Commissioners Association, comes with mixed feelings.
Group of 5 programs are likely jumping for joy that there will be a way to get prospects signed and off-limits to Power 5 programs looking to fill their recruiting classes after December.
In the 2016 class, there were 189 decommitments and flips from FBS prospects in the month of January alone. Plenty of those flips came from Group of 5 commitments who were receiving new attention from higher-level programs late in the process.
“There is a definite benefit for Group of 5 teams because they do not have to worry about their guys getting poached in January, when the Power 5 schools waiting on certain prospects learn they aren't landing the kid,” one Group of 5 coach said. “It forces the Power 5 schools to show their hands and make decisions on kids earlier in the calendar.”
Another Group of 5 coach echoed those sentiments: "This will only help Group of 5 schools to sign student-athletes before Power 5 schools use those kids as fallback plans."
The first early signing period for Division I will run from Dec. 20 to Dec. 22, 2017.
Prospective student-athletes will have the option to sign in December or wait until the first Wednesday in February, as usual. That means the decision won’t protect every recruit from decommitting, but it could drastically reduce the number of flips.
Some believe an early signing period will put recruits in a difficult predicament. If a prospect decides to sign early and the head coach of that program leaves or is fired, the recruit is bound to that school by the national letter of intent.
That could cause some prospects and their families to pause because it would lock the recruit in without knowing who the coach will be in the future. It also causes concern about whether some prospects will be pressured into signing early to get them off the market and away from other programs.
Along with the decision to allow prospects to sign early, recruits will be able to take official visits starting April 1, 2018. As it stands now, the 2018 class has to wait until the first day of class of their senior year.
The 2019 prospects will be the first benefactor of the early official visits. Recruits are excited about the opportunity, as are some of the college programs.
Big Ten teams in particular will have the opportunity to bring targets and their families to campus while paying for travel and accommodations in the spring. The weather in the Midwest is typically better then, and most Big Ten programs are now recruiting nationally.
That will allow prospects from farther away to visit earlier, but according to one Big Ten coach, there are still some negatives with that new rule as well.
“Instead of a coach taking a risk and letting a kid visit or a parent paying out of their pocket to come up early, he’ll come up for an official visit, love it, and then he’ll want to visit again later on,” the coach said. “So it’s going to reverse-engineer the process, and the recruit’s parents will end up paying for it on the back end because that kid isn’t going to want to just visit in the spring or summer.”
The coach said elite prospects tend to wait to make their final decisions anyway, so they would prefer to get the higher-level recruits on campus closer to their decisions leading up to signing day.
The rule is designed to help make the recruiting process easier and less of a burden for both sides. Whether that happens remains to be seen.