'You only get three or four weekends, when you get both days off, all year with you family.'
It was a bit like seeing George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte together in the same photo. Or, if the flip side of this analogy is more your speed, Darth Vader and Thanos standing around the same bad guy water cooler. Two titanic figures in their field who exist on parallel timelines never to intersect, and yet there they were, existing right next to each other.
I'm talking, of course, of the video clip that caught Tom Herman and Jimbo Fisher, donning sport coats and sitting next to each other on stage at the Texas high school football coaches convention. And they weren't just sitting next to each other, they were clearly in engaged conversation about... something.
Fisher told Chris Hummer of 247Sports and the answer was much more benign than your imagination would like it to be. Like colleagues of any profession, they were griping about their jobs.
“It’s hard now,” Fisher told the site. “When do you have enough family time? When are you taking vacation? Do you get a vacation? Do you cut it back? … We’re dealing with official visits in April, May and June. Every weekend there’s official visits so coaches are there. You’ve got them in December and January. You’re playing in the fall. You’ve got spring ball. Every weekend you’ve got unofficial visitors coming.
“You only get three or four weekends, when you get both days off, all year with you family. Think about that. They say, ‘Well, you make a lot of money.’ That’s all great. But you’ve got family and everything else in the world to think about. That’s the schedule we’re dealing with.”
The early signing period has been met with positive reviews by coaches, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone publicly in support of the concurrent change to allow official visits in April, May and June. Fisher said he'd like to see the December signing date moved up to July to allow players with their minds made up to get the recruiting process out of the way, which would then no longer require coaches to babysit their commits over the course of their own seasons.
But how would high school coaches feel if their seniors already had scholarship papers signed before the season? And when are those players supposed to take official visits if they're signing in July?
It's a thorny issue wrought with unintended consequences, but Fisher and Herman apparently agree on one thing.
“People have no idea,” Fisher said. “You’re killing these assistant coaches.”
Read the full story here.
