Why are we writing this? Well, no reason. Just started writing one night for our magazine, blew way past my allotted space and went with it. Figured we'd post it here just 'cause …
As college football recruiting becomes more and more of a Jerry Springer freakshow caricature of itself with every year that passes, it rings truer and truer: There's got to be a better way.
But where to begin? There's no going back now on so much of what's made this a process that makes kids and families crazy and college coaches, oftentimes, even crazier.
It's an arena where nobility and integrity have become dwindling commodities, like phosphorus or tolerable mainstream music.
Recruits have been lied to since the dawn of time, colleges historically holding all the leverage in the form of their ability to keep information from those they need to lure.
The playing field is now level, with media coverage (and yes, we're part of the problem, but a small part), and more notably, social media have stripped coaches of that luxury, of the ability to tell a running back he's their one and only guy, only for him to show up in August alongside three others, or for coaches to be able to find a recruit in December, land him, then keep it a secret until he signs his life over. Some of the more naïve in the coaching ranks, or most delusional or desperate, still believe they can keep secrets in this era.
Recruits are more empowered than ever and more fought-over.
The information age has changed what used to be a flattened world regionally. A kid who might have had five offers by September of his senior year 10 years ago now may have eight and the kid who used to have eight now may have 20.
And they're now conditioned to play the field to its max.
The stigma of the de-commitment is gone and the process is simply not viewed with the reverence and importance it maybe once was or should be. You see influential third-parties out there using hashtags like #FootballHustle and #GameofRecruiting in their tweets, illustrating a certain mentality that this is, in fact, a game. It's not a game. It's the most important decision of most of these young peoples' lives to this point and a process that can absolutely, positively impact their development in this very important, very fragile stage of their growth into (hopefully) functional adults.
It's not a game, but it's treated like one, by all parties, whether it's the constant coming and going of "committable" or "live" scholarship offers from colleges or the constant wishy-washy "commitments" being made by young people.
Purdue recruited a player this year who committed to one school on Jan. 20, then another on Jan. 27, then signed with yet another on Feb. 6, his ultimate destination being a program that had never been much of a factor in his recruitment until the 11th hour. In so many cases, the "commitment" has become the "reservation."
Everyone is entitled to a change of heart, maybe even two.
But here's what signing day has become: That moment in third grade when the music stops and everyone haphazardly lunges for a wooden classroom chair.
The signing period debate is a mainstream conversation now and something, it would seem, will eventually come of it, most likely in the form of a December signing date in advance of the traditional February one.
An early signing period can be a game-changer. It would save coaches time and resources now dedicated/wasted on their winter baby-sitting duties with their own commitments. It would allow coaches to engage other recruits more substantively later in the process, because they won't be stretched as thin. And it would allow coaches and recruits alike some normalcy and certainty during the chaotic home stretch of recruiting.
By why stop there?
My question has long been this: Why do there have to be signing dates at all? Football is different. From a numbers perspective, there's nothing like it. From a recruiting perspective, because of those numbers, there's nothing like it. From a publicity standpoint, there's nothing like it.
It's different. It's OK for it to be treated differently, just like football should be treated differently in the context of Title IX compliance, if you ask me. It has no peer.
My thought on signing dates for football - for whatever the nothing it's worth is - has been this: Get rid of 'em. Hell, we might be approaching a day anyway in which many of the top players don't sign letters-of-intent anyway and just wait 'til June to figure out where they're going to enroll.
Think that sounds unreasonable? Well, you'd be shocked at what would have been considered "unreasonable" 10 years ago.
Get rid of signing periods altogether in football.
Do this instead: Implement a structure in which a recruit can apply to the NLI program for his paperwork at any time after he has A) been entered into the eligibility clearinghouse and B) taken an official visit to the school he wants to sign with. The "application" process serves solely for the purpose of a cooling-off period. Once the LOI comes in, he is free to sign at any time.
At his and the school's risk.
Are there flaws here? Of course.
But here is what this sort of structure would do:
1. Cut down the early willy-nilly offers that set a chaotic tone to recruiting in the first place. Schools would have to be dead certain about a recruit - and his grades - before signing him, because they stand to be stuck with him.
2. Allow recruits to put their signature where their mouth is, ending recruiting in one fell swoop and guaranteeing their scholarship whereas a scholarship would not otherwise be entirely guaranteed.
3. It would give college coaches some level of certainty in an arena where there's none. If a kid commits, then isn't willing to finish it, then that college should know where it stands and should begin recruiting Plan B. When you start recruiting Plan B on Dec. 1 as opposed to Jan. 17, then that's a better situation for everyone involved, for myriad reasons.
4. It would allow for peace and quiet for recruits. Yes, a kid who is committed has the choice to simply not answer the phone, but nowadays, the commitment is not respected - such are the conditions on the ground for recruiters and those who don't play the game will be hard-pressed to remain viable - and there will be hassles for even the most steadfastly committed recruit oftentimes.
5. It would prolong the excitement of national signing day and be a great thing from a promotional angle for college football, even if it would make for a little too much going on during the season. You could have 20 individual signing days a year, theoretically, and thus 20 golden promotional opportunities for your program and your signee. Right now, recruits' big day sees them lumped in with a dozen-and-a-half other dudes on the college-announcement end of things.
Again, there are all sorts of flaws and questions to this sort of arrangement. For one thing, you'd have to move up the time frame on when high school seniors can make official visits without compromising the summer months in which college coaches get at least some chances to be normal human beings. Or just have two designated weekends in late summer for fish-in-a-barrel recruiting visits, for those who want to not only sign early, but early.
People smarter than me can iron all this out, I'm sure.
And there would have to be a drop-dead date on signing. Schools need to know who will be on their roster by a certain date. Would that just become a de facto "signing date"? Yeah, probably, but it doesn't mean it's a deal-breaker here.
While we're solving all the world's problems here, let's talk about mail.
This is an electronic age. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Instagram, Snapchat and texting have made connecting with recruits an entirely different ball game for college coaches. Five years from now, college coaches could very well be projecting holograms of themselves right into recruits' living rooms. Or brains.
With that said, there is no reason there shouldn't be some sort of cap put on mail.
I don't want to pick on Notre Dame, because they're playing the game and playing it very well, but the Pot of Gold - a packet of dozens of letters, gold paper coins or whatever else they come up with next year - is a joke.
As a card-carrying tree-hugger, I'll tell you it's obscenely wasteful, for one thing.
And at the same time, the superficiality of that stuff sets a well, superficial, tone for a process from which substance has been stripped.
Teenagers sometimes respond to shiny things the same way trout do and coaches know this, and so the tone is set for recruiting with simple mindless imagery.
Purdue does it with its locker room images on its letters. It has done it tastefully and with some measure of elegance, though.
Wake Forest on the other hand - and please understand how well respected an academic institution Wake Forest is - comes up with this drivel: A horribly Photoshopped "People" cover of a recruit with a Kardashian.
This might be the very moment The Fonz cleared the shark.
(Still undecided how I feel about Georgia's hand-drawn portraits[/URL])
My proposal: One piece of mail per week. Whatever you want it to be, whether it be academic info, a generic letter, a cool poster, a photo, whatever.
One exception: The formal scholarship offer. You get an free pass for that one. A player can get two pieces of mail that week.
Otherwise, everything else can be sent electronically or not sent at all.
One piece of mail per week.
Who among us beside the USPS can't get behind that?
Mail-bombing recruits isn't helping. It's a constant daily ego stroke built on superficial grounds.
If recruits are going to act like idiots in recruiting sometimes and make decisions for what most of us would consider the wrong reasons, maybe it has something to do with the fact they're being treated like idiots in recruiting and being sold all the wrong reasons.
This is a superficial game, one in which a very prominent college football program has a director of player personnel - a crucially important position to any coaching staff, maybe the most important - who dubs himself on Twitter a "#Swaggernaut." This is a grown-up who I can only assume has never set foot on any sort of swag planet. This is what it has come to.
Coaches allot time every week to crafting hand-written mail to recruits, men of a generation brought up to write in cursive corresponding with kids in an age where cursive is being withdrawn from schools' curriculums at the elementary levels. A few years from now, those writing cursive may be essentially writing letters in Vulcan.
This is simply mindless busywork, like my daughter sitting down with a box of crayons to color a picture of a chicken waiting for her summer zoo club class to start.
In this day of enhanced sensitivity to student-athlete welfare - and not enough on coaches' welfare, IMO - don't these grown men have something better to do with their time? You know, like keeping up with the lives and grades of their current athletes, or maybe spending an extra 10 minutes a day with their families? College basketball coaches are starting to drop from stress. How many NFL coaches have had heart issues? We have to take better care of our coaches.
As is, these accomplished professionals essentially sit there writing, "Danny/Cole/Jabari, you are one of the most outstanding prospects we have seen in the 2016 class and we look forward to recruiting you," a hundred times on the chalkboard after school.
These men deserve a little more dignity than what's being afforded them now, playing a silly children's game that gets worse every year, at the mercy of immature decisions brought on at least in some part by a process that enables immaturity.
Recruits deserve dignity as well, to be talked to, and recruited, with respect and treated at least to some extent like the adults they'll soon be. For some of them, this surreal process can set a tone for their whole life, for all we know.
It's a broken process, and the crack worsens every year. There's no going back now, but it certainly does seem like there are some very practical solutions out there to stem the insanity just a bit.
I want to repeat this before you call me a hypocrite: Yes, the media exacerbates things by shining a spotlight on recruits and the theatrics of their decisions. But relative to some of the very fundamental issues with recruiting nowadays, exposure is a secondary issue, certainly not the root cause of all the issues. The guess here is that if the process becomes a little more sane, so will the coverage of it.
No one would have watched Springer had all his guests been perfectly normal, well-adjusted, low-maintenance people.
And the news vans only show up for the biggest fires.
This post was edited on 2/25 12:34 PM by Brian_GoldandBlack.com
As college football recruiting becomes more and more of a Jerry Springer freakshow caricature of itself with every year that passes, it rings truer and truer: There's got to be a better way.
But where to begin? There's no going back now on so much of what's made this a process that makes kids and families crazy and college coaches, oftentimes, even crazier.
It's an arena where nobility and integrity have become dwindling commodities, like phosphorus or tolerable mainstream music.
The playing field is now level, with media coverage (and yes, we're part of the problem, but a small part), and more notably, social media have stripped coaches of that luxury, of the ability to tell a running back he's their one and only guy, only for him to show up in August alongside three others, or for coaches to be able to find a recruit in December, land him, then keep it a secret until he signs his life over. Some of the more naïve in the coaching ranks, or most delusional or desperate, still believe they can keep secrets in this era.
Recruits are more empowered than ever and more fought-over.
The information age has changed what used to be a flattened world regionally. A kid who might have had five offers by September of his senior year 10 years ago now may have eight and the kid who used to have eight now may have 20.
And they're now conditioned to play the field to its max.
The stigma of the de-commitment is gone and the process is simply not viewed with the reverence and importance it maybe once was or should be. You see influential third-parties out there using hashtags like #FootballHustle and #GameofRecruiting in their tweets, illustrating a certain mentality that this is, in fact, a game. It's not a game. It's the most important decision of most of these young peoples' lives to this point and a process that can absolutely, positively impact their development in this very important, very fragile stage of their growth into (hopefully) functional adults.
It's not a game, but it's treated like one, by all parties, whether it's the constant coming and going of "committable" or "live" scholarship offers from colleges or the constant wishy-washy "commitments" being made by young people.
Purdue recruited a player this year who committed to one school on Jan. 20, then another on Jan. 27, then signed with yet another on Feb. 6, his ultimate destination being a program that had never been much of a factor in his recruitment until the 11th hour. In so many cases, the "commitment" has become the "reservation."
Everyone is entitled to a change of heart, maybe even two.
But here's what signing day has become: That moment in third grade when the music stops and everyone haphazardly lunges for a wooden classroom chair.
The signing period debate is a mainstream conversation now and something, it would seem, will eventually come of it, most likely in the form of a December signing date in advance of the traditional February one.
An early signing period can be a game-changer. It would save coaches time and resources now dedicated/wasted on their winter baby-sitting duties with their own commitments. It would allow coaches to engage other recruits more substantively later in the process, because they won't be stretched as thin. And it would allow coaches and recruits alike some normalcy and certainty during the chaotic home stretch of recruiting.
By why stop there?
My question has long been this: Why do there have to be signing dates at all? Football is different. From a numbers perspective, there's nothing like it. From a recruiting perspective, because of those numbers, there's nothing like it. From a publicity standpoint, there's nothing like it.
It's different. It's OK for it to be treated differently, just like football should be treated differently in the context of Title IX compliance, if you ask me. It has no peer.
My thought on signing dates for football - for whatever the nothing it's worth is - has been this: Get rid of 'em. Hell, we might be approaching a day anyway in which many of the top players don't sign letters-of-intent anyway and just wait 'til June to figure out where they're going to enroll.
Think that sounds unreasonable? Well, you'd be shocked at what would have been considered "unreasonable" 10 years ago.
Get rid of signing periods altogether in football.
Do this instead: Implement a structure in which a recruit can apply to the NLI program for his paperwork at any time after he has A) been entered into the eligibility clearinghouse and B) taken an official visit to the school he wants to sign with. The "application" process serves solely for the purpose of a cooling-off period. Once the LOI comes in, he is free to sign at any time.
At his and the school's risk.
Are there flaws here? Of course.
But here is what this sort of structure would do:
1. Cut down the early willy-nilly offers that set a chaotic tone to recruiting in the first place. Schools would have to be dead certain about a recruit - and his grades - before signing him, because they stand to be stuck with him.
2. Allow recruits to put their signature where their mouth is, ending recruiting in one fell swoop and guaranteeing their scholarship whereas a scholarship would not otherwise be entirely guaranteed.
3. It would give college coaches some level of certainty in an arena where there's none. If a kid commits, then isn't willing to finish it, then that college should know where it stands and should begin recruiting Plan B. When you start recruiting Plan B on Dec. 1 as opposed to Jan. 17, then that's a better situation for everyone involved, for myriad reasons.
4. It would allow for peace and quiet for recruits. Yes, a kid who is committed has the choice to simply not answer the phone, but nowadays, the commitment is not respected - such are the conditions on the ground for recruiters and those who don't play the game will be hard-pressed to remain viable - and there will be hassles for even the most steadfastly committed recruit oftentimes.
5. It would prolong the excitement of national signing day and be a great thing from a promotional angle for college football, even if it would make for a little too much going on during the season. You could have 20 individual signing days a year, theoretically, and thus 20 golden promotional opportunities for your program and your signee. Right now, recruits' big day sees them lumped in with a dozen-and-a-half other dudes on the college-announcement end of things.
Again, there are all sorts of flaws and questions to this sort of arrangement. For one thing, you'd have to move up the time frame on when high school seniors can make official visits without compromising the summer months in which college coaches get at least some chances to be normal human beings. Or just have two designated weekends in late summer for fish-in-a-barrel recruiting visits, for those who want to not only sign early, but early.
People smarter than me can iron all this out, I'm sure.
And there would have to be a drop-dead date on signing. Schools need to know who will be on their roster by a certain date. Would that just become a de facto "signing date"? Yeah, probably, but it doesn't mean it's a deal-breaker here.
While we're solving all the world's problems here, let's talk about mail.
This is an electronic age. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Instagram, Snapchat and texting have made connecting with recruits an entirely different ball game for college coaches. Five years from now, college coaches could very well be projecting holograms of themselves right into recruits' living rooms. Or brains.
With that said, there is no reason there shouldn't be some sort of cap put on mail.
I don't want to pick on Notre Dame, because they're playing the game and playing it very well, but the Pot of Gold - a packet of dozens of letters, gold paper coins or whatever else they come up with next year - is a joke.
As a card-carrying tree-hugger, I'll tell you it's obscenely wasteful, for one thing.
And at the same time, the superficiality of that stuff sets a well, superficial, tone for a process from which substance has been stripped.
Teenagers sometimes respond to shiny things the same way trout do and coaches know this, and so the tone is set for recruiting with simple mindless imagery.
Purdue does it with its locker room images on its letters. It has done it tastefully and with some measure of elegance, though.
Wake Forest on the other hand - and please understand how well respected an academic institution Wake Forest is - comes up with this drivel: A horribly Photoshopped "People" cover of a recruit with a Kardashian.
This might be the very moment The Fonz cleared the shark.
(Still undecided how I feel about Georgia's hand-drawn portraits[/URL])
My proposal: One piece of mail per week. Whatever you want it to be, whether it be academic info, a generic letter, a cool poster, a photo, whatever.
One exception: The formal scholarship offer. You get an free pass for that one. A player can get two pieces of mail that week.
Otherwise, everything else can be sent electronically or not sent at all.
One piece of mail per week.
Who among us beside the USPS can't get behind that?
Mail-bombing recruits isn't helping. It's a constant daily ego stroke built on superficial grounds.
If recruits are going to act like idiots in recruiting sometimes and make decisions for what most of us would consider the wrong reasons, maybe it has something to do with the fact they're being treated like idiots in recruiting and being sold all the wrong reasons.
This is a superficial game, one in which a very prominent college football program has a director of player personnel - a crucially important position to any coaching staff, maybe the most important - who dubs himself on Twitter a "#Swaggernaut." This is a grown-up who I can only assume has never set foot on any sort of swag planet. This is what it has come to.
Coaches allot time every week to crafting hand-written mail to recruits, men of a generation brought up to write in cursive corresponding with kids in an age where cursive is being withdrawn from schools' curriculums at the elementary levels. A few years from now, those writing cursive may be essentially writing letters in Vulcan.
This is simply mindless busywork, like my daughter sitting down with a box of crayons to color a picture of a chicken waiting for her summer zoo club class to start.
In this day of enhanced sensitivity to student-athlete welfare - and not enough on coaches' welfare, IMO - don't these grown men have something better to do with their time? You know, like keeping up with the lives and grades of their current athletes, or maybe spending an extra 10 minutes a day with their families? College basketball coaches are starting to drop from stress. How many NFL coaches have had heart issues? We have to take better care of our coaches.
As is, these accomplished professionals essentially sit there writing, "Danny/Cole/Jabari, you are one of the most outstanding prospects we have seen in the 2016 class and we look forward to recruiting you," a hundred times on the chalkboard after school.
These men deserve a little more dignity than what's being afforded them now, playing a silly children's game that gets worse every year, at the mercy of immature decisions brought on at least in some part by a process that enables immaturity.
Recruits deserve dignity as well, to be talked to, and recruited, with respect and treated at least to some extent like the adults they'll soon be. For some of them, this surreal process can set a tone for their whole life, for all we know.
It's a broken process, and the crack worsens every year. There's no going back now, but it certainly does seem like there are some very practical solutions out there to stem the insanity just a bit.
I want to repeat this before you call me a hypocrite: Yes, the media exacerbates things by shining a spotlight on recruits and the theatrics of their decisions. But relative to some of the very fundamental issues with recruiting nowadays, exposure is a secondary issue, certainly not the root cause of all the issues. The guess here is that if the process becomes a little more sane, so will the coverage of it.
No one would have watched Springer had all his guests been perfectly normal, well-adjusted, low-maintenance people.
And the news vans only show up for the biggest fires.
This post was edited on 2/25 12:34 PM by Brian_GoldandBlack.com
