Filed under: USC, NCAA FB Recruiting, General CFB Insanity

An early signing period may be coming to college football. In fact, in a recent American Football Coaches Association poll, 73% of coaches favored an AFCA recommendation for an early signing period. Signing Day would then shift from February to December. The AFCA sent those findings to coaches, and Pete Carroll flipped.

Carroll is especially upset – he faxed back his response with “this is a terrible change!!” scrawled across the bottom

Exclamation point exclamation point (!!). Nice.

I’m with Carroll on this one, the proposal would be ridiculously unfair to the athletes. It also likely furthers Carroll’s opinion that other coaches are “lazy”. Coaches are still being hired and fired after December, the season’s not over, and not all players have been able to make recruiting visits or would rather make them once the high school and college football seasons have ended.

There’s no reason to lock players into commitments especially when recruiting is a two-way, usually lengthy information gathering process. The greater amount of time given to it, the more all parties are able to gather about the other and make the best possible decision.

This is bad policy.

I’ve got a forum here at FanHouse to make my opinion known, but I admire Carroll’s less nuanced Fax Machine Diplomacy. Maybe he’s onto something.

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