College football’s new early signing period starts Wednesday. Here are the pros & cons

On Wednesday, Missouri’s football program expects to sign 20 of its current verbal commitments as part of the NCAA’s new early signing period that runs through Friday. That’s about six weeks earlier than these recruits would have been able to sign in past years.

The new rule was put into place in April. And like most things the NCAA introduces, it came with questions about whether it helps athletes.

The rule will help colleges lock down classes earlier and avoid other programs poaching their recruits, but it also presents new questions regarding how coaching vacancies will impact the recruiting process and whether teenagers will have time to change their minds.

Since the rule was passed, Tigers coach Barry Odom has said it will take a few years to see how it really changes the landscape. He wonders if it’s “letting kids be kids,” because it accelerates the recruiting process and puts more stress on them.

Alabama coach Nick Saban and Duke coach David Cutcliffe have taken the same stance as Odom, with their main complaints being that the rule puts a lot of emphasis on recruiting while teams are preparing for bowl games and are potentially suffering from staff attrition.

Odom, who started his career as a high school coach, was recently in Georgia and Texas for recruiting and said playoff games were still going on in both states.

“We need to look at it as an organization for what is best for kids,” Odom said. “You don’t want to interrupt their season when they’re trying to win a state championship. But that’s what the rule is and we’re going to make the best of it and make it work.”

The rule doesn’t affect every high school player. Highly recruited players such as Missouri’s Drew Lock or Terry Beckner, both of whom had dozens of scholarship offers out of high school, could have called almost any college on National Signing Day and found a spot on the team because of the exceptional demand for them.

But players who were late bloomers or might have received a late scholarship offer from a higher-caliber program will now have to make a decision quicker than they’d like to. Vincent Gray, the lone Missouri commit who wasn’t expected to sign Wednesday, was offered by Michigan on Monday.

“If a kid is kind of under-recruited, breaks out and has a really good senior year, six weeks after his season — that doesn’t leave him a lot of time to go through the recruiting process,” Bishop Miege coach Jon Holmes said.

Holmes thinks the rule allows teams to spend the month of January focusing on positions of need that a program has yet to address instead of trying to keep the current class intact.

Last season, Bishop Miege wide receiver Jafar Armstrong was committed to Missouri for months and was one of the Tigers’ biggest supporters on Twitter. But after a huge senior season, when he caught 21 touchdown passes and broke the Kansas state record for career touchdowns with 45, he got on the radar of Minnesota and Notre Dame.

Armstrong took two official visits to those schools late in the recruiting process and wound up signing with Notre Dame. Holmes said if there was an early signing period in place a year ago, it would have been different.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that he would’ve signed at Mizzou,” he said.

While Holmes thinks the new rule will help colleges keep players like Armstrong from slipping away, it also puts them at a crossroads if new schools come into the picture late in the year.

“It puts guys in a situation where do I take the lower offer or do I roll the dice and see if there’s going to be something for me in January?” said Carl Reed, the coach at Lutheran North in St. Louis. “And you just have to decide what you’re willing to do if it doesn’t work out for you.”

Missouri running backs coach Cornell Ford said the situation has caused recruits to make “reservation commitments.” A kid pledges to a lower-level program and continues to explore other options, but he has the ability to fall back on the lower-level scholarship offer if other things don’t work out.

In 2015 Missouri fought off late pushes from Nebraska and Wisconsin to hold onto linebacker Terez Hall, now a junior for the Tigers and one of Mizzou’s best defensive players. Hall said he would have loved to sign early.

“That recruiting stuff is way too stressful,” he said. “Super stressful.”

Daniel Parker, a Blue Springs standout defensive end and Missouri’s top in-state pledge, said he likes the rule because it locks him in early, which means a school could not pull its non-binding scholarship offer if he was just a verbal commitment to a team that ended up landing a player it liked more at his position.

Reed said the biggest concern the new signing period presents is how schools are going to handle recruits who sign early but have the coach who primarily recruited the athlete depart the program soon after the regular season.

For example, James Foster, a quarterback from Alabama who was considering Missouri despite decommitting from the program in the fall, dropped the Tigers from his list of finalists immediately after offensive coordinator Josh Heupel left to become coach at Central Florida.

College football has had a crazier coaching carousel this year compared to most. Multiple Power Five jobs have opened up and many of those schools are still looking for a coach. Others that already have one are still putting their staffs together.

“It puts (recruits) in a bad situation,” Reed said. “We will have so much coaching movement between Dec. 20 and National Signing Day (Feb. 7, 2018) that it’s just completely unfair to the players that they have to pick their school prior to that coach being completely in place.”

There’s thought that the early signing period could go away in a few years after coaches have had enough cycles of it to decide whether it’s beneficial to college football.

But like most things with the NCAA, Reed said only the coaches and athletic directors can influence change.

“The kids don’t have a voice with the NCAA,” he said.

This story was originally published December 19, 2017 at 2:22 PM with the headline "College football’s new early signing period starts Wednesday. Here are the pros & cons."