Early signing period is more reality than idea

By Will Vandervort.

Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner John Swofford said during his Commissioner’s Forum earlier this week as part of the ACC’s Annual Football Kickoff in Greensboro, N.C., that an early signing period in college football could be in place by next fall.

“Whether we can get there by then, I don’t know,” Swofford said. “It’s been a change that our league has been supportive of for a number of years, and we just haven’t been able to get enough other people to agree with us on it, so we keep working at it.”

Those people are the Conference Commissioner’s Association, which handles issues such as these for the NCAA. Swofford said the CCA spoke about the early signing period issue at their national conference in May and that Jon Steinbrecher, the commissioner of the MAC, is now chairing a committee to see what they can come up with that would be agreeable to enough people to get it passed.

Adding an early signing period would take away some of the anxiety of the post-season recruiting frenzy for both the coaches and the players. If a player has already signed, they will not be able to change their mind without asking out of their signed letter-of-intent.

Of course college coaches love the idea as do high school coaches, who sometimes have to fight off other colleges once a kid commits to a school.

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney has been clamoring for an early signee period for several years, even when he was the recruiting coordinator for Tommy Bowden’s Clemson teams in the early 2000s. Other NCAA sanctioned sports have an early signing period such as men’s and women’s basketball and baseball to name a few.

“It’s ridiculous that we don’t have one,” Swinney said. “It’s a waste of a lot of peoples’ time, it’s a waste of a lot of money and it creates a lot of the garbage that goes on in recruiting. A lot of that would be eliminated.”

This summer, Clemson has 20 commitments for the 2015 signing class, which according to ESPN.com, ranks as the No. 2 recruiting class in the country behind Alabama. But national signing day is still six months away and a lot can change between now and February.

Unlike those players who might sign early with the Clemson basketball and baseball teams, football players can change their mind and can continue to be recruited by competing schools.

There are some schools out there that will do the best they can to discredit the school or coach a player has committed to in hopes to get him to change his mind about his decision. It can make life stressful for everyone involved.

“If you had a signing day in September, or let’s say October 1, well if those guys don’t sign with you, well then you know that they’re not committed,” Swinney said. “You know then that you better get to work and make sure that we’re going to be able to fill our numbers because we can’t count on these guys.

“The flip side of that is that all of those guys that sign with you, because they know what they want to do, then they can enjoy their senior year and enjoy the confidence of knowing that they got their scholarship.”

It’s a win-win for all involved, right? Well, some believe it can tie a player down and force them to do something they may not want to do especially if a head coach or their position coach takes another job somewhere else. Others believe it could come back and hurt the school if a player signs early and then gets in trouble or has academic issues that could hurt his eligibility to enter school.

“We’re willing to have some flexibility as to when (the early signing period is), but we feel it’s something that would be healthy for the game, healthy for the institutions and healthy for the young men being recruited,” Swofford said.