It's kitchen table time for recruits and their families ahead of summer decisions

No matter when official visits are taken or when announcement dates are scheduled, one thing is a certainty in the ever-changing recruiting landscape.

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Families and those involved with college decisions sit down and go over all the data accumulated throughout the recruiting process in order to come to a decision on where the gifted teenage son will start his football career.

This process used to take place just before January turned to February when official visit season was after the season. When spring and summer official visits became possible within the past decade, kitchen table time moved up six months for most prospects and found a home in the late part of June and early July.

The process from home to home looks different. The process doesn’t always look like this, but Texas target and Marietta (Ga.) Kell linebacker Brayden Rouse laid out what the model family discussion looks like after his mid-June official visit to Texas.

“Every week after our official visits, we’ll sit down,” Rouse said. “I have all the things I’m looking for in a school, like my priorities. Then we’ll rank them one out of ten, and we’ll have a score for each week. Then on top of that, before OVs, we also ranked. So, we’ll compare the before and after the OV scores, then I’ll sit down with my family.”

The kitchen table time isn’t always at home.

“We’re going to go on a beach trip all before all this to sit back and relax and talk with family,” Rouse said. “Just staying away from football will be big, and I think it will come to me.”

No matter where Rouse chooses, that’s a smart process. Kitchen table time allows families to approach emotional decisions as objectively as possible by gathering all information and making use of it for one final call.

A number of factors go into kitchen table time including things like academics, playing time, proximity to home, program comfort, championship contention, cultural and positional fit, NFL development, and life after football.

Of course, there’s the semi-recent variable of Name, Image, and Likeness and the even more recent addition of revenue sharing opportunities. Some schools may be able to offer more cash than others, and while that is sometimes rightly labeled as the deciding factor, it’s not always the case. But at the kitchen table, it’s another aspect that has to be weighed when making a commitment decision.

The kitchen table isn’t restricted to family members. High school coaches, trainers, agents, and those the decision nucleus allow to get involved have their say. Whether or not those parties have a seat at the table is a case-by-case thing.

So often, recruits tell media post-visit and in interviews that their visits to Texas gave them the sense that they were in a family atmosphere. Whichever coach started using that term and made efforts to label their football program that way was a visionary, as every NCAA football program worth a darn has tried their best to do the same.

Some family atmospheres are authentic. Some aren’t. It’s up to these conversations to see through what’s real and what isn’t. That’s something that applies to every point of deliberation for prospects ahead of late June and early July decisions.

This isn’t a college football specific process. It happens in basketball. It happens in rowing. It even happens when families are trying to determine what the best engineering or liberal arts school is for their child that doesn’t have a few stars by their name for their efforts on the gridiron.

The process isn’t football specific, but football recruiting’s kitchen table time has its own peculiarities, benefits, and drawbacks. The program that did the best job meeting all the criteria, money or otherwise, throughout the recruiting process is the one that will reap the benefits when it comes time to post the edit commit or put on the hat in front of friends and family.

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Those decisions are made after careful consideration around the kitchen table.