College Football: Should There Be an Early Signing Period?

Could we soon have an early signing period in college football recruiting?

Yesterday, the SEC’s coaches voted 9-3 in favor of asking the league to back a November signing period, similar to the one that college basketball currently has.

The three coaches who weren’t in favor of the idea were Florida’s Urban Meyer, South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, and Arkansas’ Bobby Petrino.

While the names who rejected the idea might not be much of a surprise, the proposal could be helpful to both schools and recruits, for a number of reasons.

However, it’s pretty obvious that it will have some opposition. Whether or not it’s rational opposition is another story.

One reason why some coaches might be opposed to the idea of an early signing period is that it would curtail their ability to go after committed prospects up until signing day. No one likes to have their guys poached by another school, but some schools benefit from the ability to pursue committed prospects. After all, nothing’s binding until the recruit signs on the dotted line.

It’d be nice to think that a prospect will always stick to his word, and many do, but you can never tell what decision some of these kids might make until they’ve signed. For fans, and especially for coaches, it can be frustrating.

However, when your future weighs in the balance, and you’ve got this guy telling you one thing, another guy telling you another one, it can complicate your decision to say the least.

That’s one thing that could potentially make an early signing period a negative, because a guy could sign early, and in the time between November and February, decide that he wants to reopen his options.

This isn’t even taking coaching changes into consideration, because when it comes to coaching changes, a player should be allowed to open his recruitment back up if he felt attached to that coaching staff or fit better into the old system than he would in the new one.

There are also some people who might wonder if an early signing period would cause coaches to push harder for commits from certain players, but it’s not like it’ll be the only signing period.

Sure, you’d like to know that you’ve got your spots filled up by a certain time, especially when there are a lot of coaches ready to pounce on your guy when you think you’ve got him.

However, there are quite a few prospects who prefer to wait until after their seasons are over to finalize their college decisions (or after signing day, if you’re Terrelle Pryor), and while it doesn’t always work in a coach’s favor, it works in his favor just as much.

There are a lot of prospects who need that extra time, and if there’s the least bit of doubt in their mind, then they don’t have to sign in November.

On the flip side, a lot of prospects who have their minds made up in November and are set on their future destination, no matter which coaches are trying to woo him.

An early signing period would be beneficial to recruits who don’t want to get suffocated by the process, because they don’t want to have to change their phone number, buy extra garbage bags for all of the letters they have to throw out, or hear more in their ears from all sides.

If the NCAA is to consider an early signing period for football, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to poll a number of recruits around the country to see how they would feel about an early signing period, but also to contact the 300+ head basketball coaches in Division I to see how they feel about the November signing period currently in play in their sport.

It would be a good way to gauge the feasibility of such an idea, especially because of the fact that the November signing period comes just when basketball seasons are starting (when a player could very well have a monster season and drive interest up), while the one in football would likely come in the midst of high school football playoffs, by which time a player has had ample time to prove his worth.

The idea is still far from being a reality, but could it happen in the near future? Should it?