Signing period goes as planned

Change lets coaches, players show their cards, decide calmly.

seth. emerson@ ATHENS — The early signing periodisannoyingforcoaches. It takes away the drama from the fifirst Wednesday in February. The early period’s timing is inconvenient and burdensome for nearly all involved.

It’s also working exactly as intended.

Therewas a reasonthe SEC was against this. It justmaybe diffifficulttoremembernow, soa quick refresher: TheSECis the recruiting behemoth nationally, and for years it has had the ability topoach recruits at the last minute from smaller schools and teams in other major conferences.

So other conferences, mainly out of self-interest, pushedtheNCAAfor theearly period, ostensibly to protect recruits but mostly to protect their ability to hold on to their commits — or to be able to react to being poached.

Others involved in the process, whether it was theNCAA or people who truly cared about the welfare of high school players, wanted the early period to prevent the following cases:

■ A player gets dumped at the last minute and doesn’t have a place to go.

■ A smaller school has a player poached by a bigger school at the last minute, and thesmaller school isn’t inposition to replace him.

That all doesn’t necessarily apply to Georgia or Alabamaor the othermajorpowers. They tend to get whom theywant, which is why SEC coacheslobbiedtheircommissionertofifighttheearlysigning period. But the SEC was outvoted. So it’s whyNick Saban, among others, has beenup in arms about this whole thing.

But Saban, KirbySmart and the other coaches are adjusting. And the rest of the country, whenthedust settles, may well be happy with the result.

What it all boils down to is the intention of the early signingperiodis tomake sure everything is clean. Every recruit goes where he ultimatelywants to go. Andwhen programs do get poached, now they have time to react:

The early signing period allows players and schools truly committed to eachother to make it offifficial. If a player is committed but doesn’t sign early, thenhe’snot reallycommitted. And if a playerwants to signbut his school tells him to hold offffffffffff, then that player should realize he needs to use the next seven weeks to examine his option.

Seven weeks, rather than the seven hours available under the old system.

The early signing period allows coaches and players to show their cards. Rather than one big crazy day, there now are two. That’s the way it’s been for basketball for years. Now it’s that way for football, where the monthplus in between signing periodsgivesachanceforthedominoes to fall more cleanly for everyone involved.

At least that’s the idea. As much of a headache as the workload is for all right now, if the early signing period has its intended effffffffffffect, theNCAA will keep it. The onlyquestion is whether the date willmove.

TheSECoriginallyproposed the early signing period take place theweek after Thanksgiving. Some still believe it should be in August, before the season. Either scenario would remove the headache of teams working on recruitingas theyget readyforbowls.