The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
NEW SIGNING PERIOD HAS ITS ADVANTAGES
Chase Kline was admittedly a little nervous as he sat at a table in his school’s library with pages of a national letter of intent laid out before him.
No, the 6-foot3, 225-pound linebacker from Chardon wasn’t wavering on his decision to sign with the Michi- gan State Spartans.
His penmanship was weighing on his mind.
“I’m not going to lie. I haven’t worked on my signature too much,” he said. “I think I got it down OK.”
Any other year, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Every year prior to this, Kline would have had six more weeks to practice up for the big day of signing his national letter of intent.
But for the first time in NCAA history, an early signing period was held in mid-December for athletes to ink their official intent for colleges.
Among the area athletes signing on Dec. 20 were Kline, his Chardon teammate Cameron Niehus (John Carroll), University quarterback Jayden Cunningham (Youngstown State) and Gilmour offensive lineman Tyler Leroux (Buffalo).
There will be another signing day on Feb. 7, which used to hold the pageantry of college selections all to itself.
But nationwide, it’s estimated up to 75 percent or more of the college football commits signed Dec. 20 — the first-ever early signing period date.
“I like it,” Kline said of the new early period.
“I think it helps teams put recruiting classes together. You can see who is really committed.”
There are plenty of pluses and minuses to the new signing period, the first of which is one Kline mentioned — players who are firmly committed can put their money where their mouth is.
It also lessens the likelihood for big-time college programs dropping a prospect just prior to a February signing date to go with a bigger name recruit, thus leaving the dropped player out in the cold and searching for another home at the last minute.
Don’t scoff — it happens all too much.
For instance, Kline said he was contacted by the likes of Minnesota, Purdue and Michigan in recent week gauging his interest in their programs.
Cunningham said he got some late feelers, too — one from Cincinnati with an opportunity for a preferred walk-on spot.
The new signing period takes all that flip-flopping out of the way.
Whoever didn’t sign on Dec. 20 is still free game. Whoever did sign showed their rock-solid commitment and didn’t subject themselves to the yo-yo effect that often happens late in the process.
“I think it’s better for people who know for sure where they want to go,” Cunningham said. “I knew Youngstown was the place I wanted to spend the next four years. The early signing period made them knew I am committed — fully committed.”
There are downsides, of course.
Most are heaped on the shoulders of college football programs.
If a coach is fired at season’s end, and a replacement isn’t named until January, there’s a decent chance the new coach could be coming into a program with a freshman class he didn’t recruit or a recruiting class that didn’t fit his system.
Many college coaches also don’t know in the middle of December how many scholarships they will have available to give out, based on how many (if any) players leave early for the NFL.
In years past, that wasn’t a issue. Every college program knew which players were leaving for the NFL and how many scholarships they had free by time the first Wednesday in February rolled around.
Ohio State coach Urban Meyer touched on the subject on Dec. 20.
“I can’t tell you who’s leaving, who’s coming,” he said. “I have some ideas, and there’s been preliminary talk, but certainly you talk about life-changing decisions for those guys and life-changing decisions for young people, the prospects ... What I’ve had happen to me is, I’ve talked to several players, and my answer to them, because we’re straightforward with them, is that I don’t know if I have a scholarship right now because I don’t know who’s leaving for the NFL Draft.”
But what it comes down to — or at least what it should come down to — is what is best for the student-athletes.
In the cases of Cunningham, Kline, Niehus and Leroux, that was sticking with the commitments they had made a long while ago, and cementing them with their signatures.
“When I commit to something, I commit to it,” Kline said. “There’s no looking back. That’s how it should be.”
Now he and everyone else who signed on the first early signing day is permitted to receive offseason training programs from their new teams to get to work in preparation for next fall.
The whirlwind circus of college recruiting, from the phone calls, texts and emails, is over. And so is the stressful part of proper penmanship.
Kampf can be reached via email at JKampf@NewsHerald.com; On Twitter @NHPreps