Two years in, it’s clearer and clearer that the Early Signing Period is the new main event.
No one really knew how to handle the first year of college football’s Early Signing Period in December.
Then, no one really knew whether that year’s results — December signatures by two thirds of the top-100 recruits, plus thousands of others throughout Division I — would carry over to the second year.
Now that we have two years of results, it’s plain to see National Signing Day has moved from its ancient February perch to the day in the middle of bowl season.
The legendary Wednesday in February is now just the day for finishing touches.
In 2018, coaches immediately decided to treat the ESP as the main day, using it to create a greater sense of urgency.
“If you’re verbally committed and you don’t sign, you’re not committed,” a Power 5 coach told us before 2018’s Early Siging Period, let alone 2019’s.
Players have evidently bought in. After the second-ever December Signing Period, only 17 of the top 100 recruits were unsigned, and some of those 17 were committed and just waiting to make it official anyway. Only one of the top 10 overall recruits, new Tennessee DT Darnell Wright, announced on Wednesday.
In previous years, we were still figuring out the top of the class rankings on a Wednesday evening in February. In 2019, No. 1 (Alabama) and No. 2 (Georgia) were essentially decided well before the first day of December’s period ended, and then Texas held firm at No. 3 as well.
February’s Signing Day had a five-star flip between rivals, a couple other relatively high-profile surprises, and one top-100 player potentially waiting for a later date, but nowhere close to the free-for-all we’ve had basically every year since this thing developed into a national spectacle.
Lots of players and coaches adjusted right away, so fans and media quickly caught on as well.
In 2019, ESPN’s February Signing Day blowout — which had long kicked off shortly after 7 a.m. ET and powered through commitment ceremonies, with coverage lingering as late as De’Anthony Thomas’ 2011 Oregon pledge at 10 p.m. ET — only had seven announcements in four hours from noon ET onward and included only two five-stars.
In fact, ESPN called the first day of December’s period “National Signing Day” up front and all day long, later also using the same name in February. (At SBNation.com, we went from using “Early Signing Period” in 2018 to “Early National Signing Day” in 2019.)
And I’ll avoid dumping internet traffic data on you, but SB Nation’s network of team sites shows clear evidence that the public had already adjusted to December having the primary recruiting day. 2019 was just confirmation of what we all suspected.
This isn’t a complaint, and no one owes us drama for the sake of drama. If all this is good for the players, then awesome.
We’ll happily redirect our attention to a day in the middle of bowl season if that improves the process for the people involved.
It’s hard to say whether it’s a net benefit for the athletes, though. Can’t enjoy seeing dozens of players sign and then immediately watch their new coaches bolt for other jobs, for one thing.
That happened under the old system, but at least it was limited to especially shameless transactions. With a December period, it’s sometimes hard to avoid. Kliff Kingsbury taking an NFL job in January is no fault of his or USC’s, but rather another piece in the argument that we should free up players whose coaches leave shortly after.
College football stays the same for a century at a time, and college football radically shifts overnight.
A sport whose national title setup has formally changed four times since 1991, with tons of tweaks throughout, is used to constant evolution. A sport that’s nevertheless spent roughly all of its 150 years arguing about who gets to play for those national titles is also used to things never really evolving all that much.
So completely altering the recruiting calendar all at once, but otherwise keeping the process the same, is pretty much par for the course.
Now let’s move this thing to July!! I’m kidding, though that idea does get thrown around every now and then.