Wednesday marks the beginning of the fifth year early signing period for Division I football.
Starting Dec. 15 and running for 72 hours, the period allows programs to nail down signatures from their verbal commitments much sooner than the traditional February signing date.
"I'll say this about the early signing period," said Steve Wiltfong, director of recruiting for 247Sports. "I thought it was originally put in place for kids that had made up their mind. It allowed them to sign early and be done with the process under the old rules."
The move to add the early dates to the traditional February signing day was indeed made to allow athletes more flexibility, and allow coaches to lock down recruits that had long been committed.
The first such period came Dec. 20-22 of 2017, or 18 days after Scott Frost was officially introduced as Nebraska's football coach. Among the players NU signed that December: quarterback Adrian Martinez, center Cam Jurgens, and safety Deontai Williams.
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In 2017, Todd Berry, the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, said coaches around the country considered the old model of signing players to be "archaic." Coaches and athletes who were already committed wanted more flexibility in when they could sign.Â
"We think this is the least intrusive to the current model and allows for the best study because this is the biggest step," Berry said in a 2017 news conference. "What is a multiple signing date going to do to the recruiting date? This is the biggest step of all. We need to evaluate that."
Now, though, the landscape of college football has changed.Â
Coaching moves are happening earlier and earlier: Frost fired four assistants on Nov. 8. Lincoln Riley left Oklahoma for USC. Brian Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU.Â
That's to say nothing of the lower-profile moves around the country happening before the regular season ends.
"What it turned into was college programs making it the real signing day," Wiltfong said. "They should have never put in the spring visits, because that accelerated everything. … You put in the April visits and it accelerated the whole process for everybody."Â
Wiltfong didn't know, he said, if the early signing period was good or bad for the sport.
But it's certainly caused massive change, to the point where there might be more change coming.
Earlier this week, Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, while speaking at the Sports Business Journal Learfield Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, said change could be on the horizon for the early dates.
Bowlsby was the chairman of the Division I football oversight committee when the early signing period first went into effect. Also on that committee? Former Nebraska athletic director Sean Eichorst.
"There's been a lot more talk than I've heard in recent years about either getting rid of (the early signing period) altogether, or perhaps moving it to after the first of the year," Bowlsby told the forum.
There's been plenty of change in the college football landscape since 2017, of course. The transfer portal has become a driving force in player movement, as has the lifting of restrictions against players who transfer, allowing them to be immediately eligible at their next school.
"Clearly, things have changed since the early signing date was put in," Bowlsby said. "The transfer portal didn't exist at the time, and there are things that have changed. At the end, we're going to have to go back to the reason we put it in place and ask if that's still a valid reason."
While there are positives to the early dates — Wiltfong pointed to college coaches not having to "babysit" their commits for two extra months and worry about another school flipping them, or smaller schools having to squeeze money out of already tight budgets to make extra visits to those players — the chaos of the past several weeks has meant change perhaps being back on the table.
"Obviously now college coaching decisions are being made dictated on the early signing period," Wiltfong said. "So we're seeing coaches getting fired sooner, and with that we're seeing other coaches leaving their posts to take different jobs sooner."
It's coaches, in the end, who will drive any change. Just as they did in 2017.
"I'm sure change will come," Wiltfong said. "The coaches manipulate all of it, so however they're feeling about it is how it will be voted upon by ADs and other people."