Moving the Early Signing Period would only be a band-aid to college football's crammed calendar
On the final day of the AFCA Convention last month in Nashville, about 40 FBS head coaches met to discuss some of the key challenges within the sport’s current landscape — the transfer portal, NIL transparency and potential guardrails and what to do with the Early Signing Period.
Most of the ACC head coaches were in attendance, including Clemson’s Dabo Swinney. Elsewhere, the likes of Ohio State’s Ryan Day, Kansas State’s Chris Klieman, TCU’s Sonny Dykes and BYU’s Kalani Sitake filled up the room.
Notably, outside of Day, the meeting was sparsely attended by the leaders in the Big Ten, and the vacuum of SEC coaches was even more present.
Only Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea, who lives in town, was there.
“Not a lot of consensus in the room,” said one prominent head coach as he exited the meeting early to catch a flight home.
Debates on what to do with the Early Signing Period, which ran until Dec. 20 this last season, remained among the more hotly-contested issues. Every coach has their own opinion.
What to do with the Early Signing Period?
The Early Signing Period was first introduced in 2017 — before the world of transfer portal windows, NIL and wild coaching carousels. There was only a four-team playoff, and now we’re looking at a 12-team field that starts in mid-December next season.
Some coaches were in favor of ditching the early signing period entirely and going back to a single signing date in February. Others advocated for a summer signing day. A few recruiting staffers were in favor of letting prospects sign whenever they wanted.
“(Changing) the dates is just going to open another can of worms anyways, so why not experiment and try something different?” one player personnel staffer said.
The SEC has other ideas, though.
The league’s absence from January’s meetings loomed large, with Dykes exiting the meetings nodding at the notion that anything discussed didn’t mean much because the opinions of the power players in the sport weren’t present.
Well, despite all the grumblings about the problematic recruiting calendar, the SEC’s coaches have long been in favor of keeping some semblance of the Early Signing Period. According to Yahoo Sports, commissioner Greg Sankey is lobbying for an early signing day during the first week of December, while making the entire month a recruiting dead period.
“Putting signing day in the middle of December with playoff games no longer works,” Sankey told Yahoo Sports.
“Move it to early December, the Wednesday before championship games. That is the concept. It’s, in part, out of respect to high school football. You’ve heard some want the signing day in June. No one has done any work on what that means for high school football. We have a responsibility to listen to the high school coaches. What we’ve heard out of the Texas group is that they do not at all support that. Everybody has to be attentive to that.”
Much of the pushback on moving the signing date to the summer is from high school coaches who fear their best players would be tempted to skip their senior seasons. That’s not an issue that’s prevalent in college basketball, which has a summer signing period, but perhaps it’s enough of a concern to outweigh the change. Another issue with a June/July signing date is coaches (and schools) want more academic information on prospects, so holding a signing day before their senior seasons is untenable to them.
As is the case with all these debates, there are little fires everywhere.
The proposal, which has momentum according to The Athletic, is still largely a band-aid solution, though.
It would alleviate some calendar chaos.
Moving the early signing period to a three (or seven) day window at the beginning of December would at least separate the transfer portal from prep recruiting. There would be no crossover with the College Football Playoff.
It may even open up some spots for high school players to secure their number on a roster before all the Wild, Wild, West movement within the portal.
However, high school prospects would still have more information about their potential homes two months later, and the original early signing period is what triggered the coaching carousel to start spinning earlier and earlier in the first place. ADs couldn’t help themselves, kickstarting the firing and hiring cycle to get out ahead of the recruiting window.
As we saw with the first few cycles, this backfired spectacularly (see the 2017 carousel which featured 21 changes and only ONE coach is still at the same school), and yet that hasn’t stopped administrators from spinning the wheel even faster in recent years. A signing period in the first week of December would accelerate the cycle to the beginning of November, creating more mess and chaos.
Ultimately, bumping up the signing period to early December would solve some problems but would fail to address the macro issue with college football’s calendar.