Viewpoint: early signing period for college football

Bill Ballard

There are a bunch of sides to this story. Say they make the early signing date Aug. 1 before the senior season. The kid may get an early offer as a junior, and he may not have played his best football in high school yet.

What if he really excels as a senior and more opportunities open up? If there is an early signing period, he may not have those opportunities because he has already signed. Then you have the kid who may not have played well as a junior, excels as a senior, and should be recruited by schools. But what if a school has already signed juniors at his position?

The good thing about an early signing date is that other people cannot continue to bother you. If a kid is a really good player, colleges are going to continue to recruit a kid, even after they have committed to another school. They are not going to back off.

Also, if colleges offer a kid, and he doesn’t commit and sign, the college can still go out and recruit his position, and they can pull the offer. If you have the early signing period before the senior year, you have a spot guaranteed.

My opinion is an early signing period is a good thing for kids. It finishes the process, and they can concentrate on their senior season.

Jim Donnan

First of all, unless it is directly related to cost containment or academic reform, you don’t see legislation like this passed by the NCAA. I doubt it’s going to be changed.

That said, the early signing period has a benefit of taking the pressure off a kid who wants to commit early. Most people I have talked to about this have said that the early signing period would be in December, corresponding with when junior-college players can sign, and I would like to see that. Why wait the extra two months with high school kids?

The other benefit is that it stops all the phone calls to kids from the recruiting services and reporters who are just doing their jobs. Coaches call kids, sure, but they don’t call as much as the press and the recruiting outlets, and those calls add up.

The real negative is that coaches get fired in December. What if that assistant coach that recruited the kid gets fired? The kid has just signed and his coach is gone.

I would be totally against doing the early signing period before the senior season because so much can happen between a kid’s junior and senior year. I would like to have an early signing period from a coach’s perspective, but it has as much chance of happening as a Division I playoff.