It appears that it has now dawned on the Powers That Be that it makes no sense to hold the early signing period at the same time as the College Football Playoff, bowl season, the coaching carousel, and the transfer portal window.
Moving and/or eliminating the December signing period was a topic of significant conversation among FBS head coaches at the AFCA convention back in January, and the conversation continued this week at the SEC spring meetings in Florida.
As Ross Dellenger reported for SI, momentum seems to be to moving the early signing day from the third Wednesday in December to late November/early December, to early August, or to any point after a prospect's senior year begins.
The first option, bumping the mid-December date up a few weeks, carries many of the same drawbacks of the current date, but it protects against players quiet-quitting or outright-quitting on their high school teams once paperwork has been signed.
Other coaches are in favor of moving the date up to August, either to a predetermined window or to a wide-open window -- once a certain date passes, the player can sign at any time.
That idea has been around a while. I first wrote about it back in 2014.
“If you called me and said, ‘I want your offer,’ and I don’t send the papers in 48 hours, you’d know Auburn isn’t quite as serious as I thought they were, and we’d know the same thing about who is serious about us if they don’t sign,” Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze said.
Other coaches argued that bumping Signing Day ahead of the transfer portal window would be a good thing for the overall health of the support, since it would allow high schoolers the opportunity to reserve a scholarship that might be taken by a transfer once that window opens in December.
As for the IAWP rule: to put in blunt terms, NIL has made it obsolete. Any school looking to, ahem, enhance their recruitment of a particular player would not do so through NIL, not by hiring his high school coach.
“With name, image and likeness … those are the true inducements. It’s not because you hired somebody,” LSU's Brian Kelly said.