College Football's New Early Signing Day Is Already Broken

Let's start here: College football needs an early signing period. It needs one for the same reasons why college basketball has long had one. The recruiting industry is built on teenagers being creeped on and cajoled by a battle royal of coaches, fans, media and Twitter stalkers on an incessant basis until one school finally emerges victorious.

This is something of an occupational hazard for the pocket of recruits who legitimately do not know where they'll attend school until the first Wednesday of February each year, better known as National Signing Day. To those who enjoy the attention, it's actually something of a perk. But there needs to be an escape hatch for the players who had settled on a decision months ahead of National Signing Day and just want the din to quiet down.

On Monday, the Collegiate Commissioners Association made one available to them: A three-day early signing period from December 20 through 22. It is garbage.

The timing falls just six weeks before Signing Day, making it woefully insufficient in a world when kids are actively recruited as early as the seventh grade. But more damning than that is what the new signing period coincides with: Bowl games and the holidays. Overtaxed coaches will be working overtime to hound players into last-minute switches during a time period that amounts to the last normal winter of their adolescent lives. Absolutely no one will enjoy it.

And that's only what happens right before the players sign. The real action heat ups two to three weeks beforehand with a final push of in-home visits and phone calls and desperate advances. This is already how things operate during the final weeks of under the current system. Except now instead of dealing with this stress during the sleepy beginning weeks of their second semester, early signees will grapple with it during the last weeks of the first—right in the middle of final exams.

None of this benefits the players, nor does a provision that binds early signees to their letters of intent in the event of a coaching change. That makes them a uniquely vulnerable population. Hiring season culminates in December and January, which gives February signees at least a sliver of time after the dust has settled to survey their options and change course if need be. Meanwhile, early enrollees—players who graduate a semester early to enroll as spring admits—decide around the same time as the new early signees will, but at least gain the benefit of participating in spring practices and can do so without signing a letter of intent. (Pro tip: never sign a letter of intent.) In effect, early signees take on all of the risk with none of the reward.

The solution—and, one would hope, the eventual endgame—goes back to timing. For an early signing period to really mean something, the window needs to open before a prospect's senior season. The NCAA recently passed another provision that allows players to take official visits at the end of their junior years; pair that with an early deadline in, say, August, and players who want to sign early can make an informed decision while also getting to enjoy their senior year in relative peace. Then, for good measure, offer to release anyone from their letters in the event of a coaching change, the way college hoops does. That makes the opportunity-cost of less attention and fewer scholarship opportunities far more palatable.

The unfortunate reality is that those tweaks won't happen unless —until—at least a couple classes are damaged by legislation that is supposed to help them. Maybe not even then. This is Band-Aid legislation for a comparable bullet wound, written by rule makers who earn a living through exploiting the athletes that live under their work. The system remains broken because there isn't much incentive to fix it. In that regard, and in that regard only, the early signing period is a success. It is NCAA rule-making at its finest.