College Football Recruiting: Is Committing Early a Good or Bad Growing Trend?

College football recruiting has vastly changed over the years. With the Internet, recruiting websites, offseason camps, combines, expanded media coverage, the explosion of 7-on-7 passing tournaments and more, recruiting looks totally revamped than it used to.

Once upon a time, a player would be unknown to many into his senior season. Coaches would use as much time as possible to evaluate him before offering him a scholarship.

Even the most highly touted high school football players would not have any scholarship offers until the summer going into their senior season, at the earliest.

Players would be be almost exclusively uncommitted during their senior seasons, playing and taking visits through the fall and winter. Between January and National Signing Day in February is when decisions would be made.

As I said before, recruiting today is not like how it used to be. In this day and age, colleges offer most of their recruiting targets during their junior seasons and decisions are being made in the spring, almost a full year before recruits are able to sign their letters of intent.

That leads me to this question: Is the growing trend of committing early good or bad for recruiting?

Out of their top 150 prospects, ESPNU lists 110 of them as having committed to a college. Some of the players such as DT Kenny Bigelow, QB Shane Morris and CB Jeryl Brazil made their commitments last year.

Some would argue that there are several reasons why committing early is a good thing, which include:

• It allows the player to focus solely on playing football and not speaking to many coaches
• The player can focus on achieving the required academic admission to his committed school
• Coaches at other schools don't waste time recruiting a player that will not sign with them
• The player can begin to help his committed school recruit other players
• There is less pressure and buildup during the player's senior season in high school

Another aspect of modern recruiting that I have noticed various recruits mention is their "slot." Coaches will put pressure on recruits by saying things long the likes of "we need a decision soon, slots are filling fast."

This is in reference to the amount of scholarships available a school has in the recruiting year. So if a school has 20 scholarships or slots for the 2013 class and they already have 16 commitments but six players they still want, they'll put the pressure on those six by telling them they only have four slots left.

In turn, a recruit will feel the pressure and commit earlier than he needs to. This could have been a potential factor that led to CB Gareon Conley committing to Michigan in March of this year.

The program that I truly believe that is responsible for pushing recruiting to having start earlier and earlier is none other than Texas.

Mack Brown was a bit innovative in his "Junior Days" and put the Longhorns on a recruiting schedule that had them recruiting a year ahead of everyone else.

Most of the time, Texas is done with their recruiting for that current year by the summer and use the fall to coach the team while evaluating and offering top juniors scholarships.

While many programs have adopted a similar schedule, many coaches feel that committing early and having to recruit players early is a bad thing, which includes reasons such as:

• The recruit feels rushed and could make a misinformed decision
• This allows more time for rival coaches to negatively recruit against the committed school
• Less time for schools to properly evaluate players
• More time for the recruit to decommit

To be honest, I think the trend of committing early is here to stay for awhile. Sure, like this year, we'll have several highly ranked recruits take their time and remain uncommitted for a good duration of the cycle, but this trend is staying.

Colleges want their recruiting classes to have a shape and form going into the summer. This gives them a good idea where they are at recruiting-wise as they turn their focus to coaching the team during summer camp and heading into the season.

So the coaches will continue to evaluate sophomore and junior tape, offering players early and pressing for a commitment during the spring and early summer before their senior seasons.

The players will continue to generally feel that pressure and more early commitments will be made. 

Good or bad, the trend of seeing many college football recruiting prospects is not likely to falter anytime soon.

Edwin Weathersby has worked in scouting/player personnel departments for three professional football teams, including the New York Giants, Cleveland Browns and the Las Vegas Gladiators of the Arena League. He spent a year evaluating prep prospects & writing specific recruiting and scouting content articles for Student Sports Football (now ESPN Rise-HS). A syndicated scout and writer, he's also contributed to WeAreSC.com, GatorBait.net and Diamonds in the Rough Inc., a College Football and NFL Draft magazine.