The AFCA convention is underway in Charlotte, but the most important conversation regarding the coaching profession may have taken place 2,500 miles away.
At a press conference before Monday night's national championship game in Los Angeles, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart and TCU's Sonny Dykes spoke in real terms about how the modern recruiting calendar -- with a December signing period and the transfer portal -- makes it difficult to recruit, run a football program, and maintain an illusion of a home life all at once. No one wants to say it's impossible, but having the ability to bend time and space would help.
For instance, try to imagine an NFL team hosting free agents during Super Bowl prep week. That's reality at TCU.
"Look, we were preparing this week for a national championship game and we had six transfers on campus on an official visit," Dykes said. "And you're just kind of like, really? I mean, are we really doing this?"
For Georgia, win or lose on Monday night, the coaching staff will fly across the country, maybe take an hour to catch their breath, and then prepare to host recruits next weekend.
"I mean, you're already looking at junior days, six, seven days from right now," Smart said. "And we're trying to play a national championship. So it doesn't stop for the coaches at the highest level."
And if you're at work 12 hours a day (conservatively, not counting travel) for 350 days a year (conservatively), there's only so many hours left to maintain a home life.
"I have a 14-year-old and an 11-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son, and I want to be able to see them and be part of their life and have a chance to spend time with them," Dykes said. "And it's very difficult if we don't have some kind of legislated time off where we can get away, where we focus not only on our players and our program, but our families and doing our job as a father and as a husband in that capacity as well."
The obvious rebuttal: Dykes and Smart are very, very well paid for their time, and both happen to be sons of coaches. So they knew what they were getting into. Smart's rebuttal to the rebuttal: "It's not the profession that I originally got into in terms of relationships and coaching," Smart said. "It's changed so much."
Whether or you feel sorry for Dykes, Smart and their families -- and, to be clear, they're not asking you to -- no one can deny the changes to the calendar. And the changes are still coming: starting in 2024, the 12 coaching staffs in the College Football Playoff will have to lock down their recruiting classes (official visit weekends, in-home visits on weeknights) while, somehow, game planning and coaching in first-round playoff games.
The NFL's calendar is highly regimented, for a reason: playoffs in mid-January to mid-February, with the coaching carousel worked in, governed by strict rules, followed by free agency in March and the draft in April.
College football does its carousel, its free agency, and its draft during the postseason.
For the two national championship coaches, the solution was obvious: mandated time off from recruiting.
"This deal is a grind," Dykes said. "And you've got to take care of your coaches and you've got to take care of your staff, and you've got to take care of yourself. And the only way that you can do that is by legislating time off. Because if we have a day – and Kirby is the same way, I'm sure, I know he is. If we have an opportunity to recruit a player, by God, we're going to recruit him. We'll have him on our campus or we're going to be in a high school or we're going to be on the phone or we're going to do something to try to secure that recruiting commitment."
"We're all to blame for kind of eating our own," Smart added. "And it's like a cannibalizing, because you won't stop. And it just keeps going."
Identifying a solution is the easy part, of course. Building the necessary consensus to get changes written into the rule book is the hard part. And that's where the spotlight shifts back to AFCA convention, where the talk in the Charlotte Convention Center is about finding a recruiting calendar that allows coaches not only to be husbands and fathers, but to be present for the 100-plus players already on their roster.
"You talk to 10 different coaches," Dykes said, "you get 10 different opinions."