Show me the money.
Official 2021 Gophers Football Recruiting Updates Thread: Links, Tweets, Videos etc
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I could be wrong, but I thought a player wouldn't receive an NLI to sign if the offer wasn't committable. I've never heard of a school rejecting a signed NLI, but maybe that means it just goes straight into the garbage bin and no one benefits from mentioning that it ever existed.
A_Slab_of_Bacon
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Schools can reject an NLI, but usually that's an admissions issue.
I have seen it for behavior type issues too IIRC.
But it is super uncommon to do it 'just because'.
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Recruiting’s Biggest Bait-and-Switch: The Uncommittable Scholarship Offer
The average Power 5 program hands out roughly 200 more scholarship offers than it can follow through on during a recruiting cycle, and the numbers game has real-life consequences.
ROSS DELLENGER
FEB 5, 2019
Foster Moreau considered it “tacky” to commit immediately despite the circumstances: His dream college in his home state had just offered him a scholarship to play football. So he waited a week, then called LSU offensive coordinator Cam Cameron to accept the offer and announced it publicly, taking to Twitter with as much excitement as ever.
This was the only major college offer that had been extended to Moreau, a three-star tight end out of a New Orleans private school, and the fact that his commitment came on Christmas Eve was part of the celebration. “It was awesome,” Moreau recalls. “I was like, ‘Let’s tweet this! It’s going to be a great tweet!’”
While Moreau’s family celebrated his all-expenses-paid future in purple-and-gold, back in Baton Rouge his name was absent from the list of 2015 commitments scribbled on a whiteboard in LSU’s recruiting war room. Only weeks later did Moreau’s high school coach relay a message from the LSU staff: He was not guaranteed a spot after all. His heart sank. He deleted the tweet, and he planned to attend Tulane.
On the morning of National Signing Day, Tricia Moreau allowed her son to sleep in, finally shaking him awake at 10 a.m. He got into the shower like normal and then his phone rang. Suds still in his hair and water trickling off his body, he answered a call that turned his uncommittable offer into a committable one. “I pick up and Les Miles is on the line,” Moreau remembers. “He says, ‘Hey, Foster, how you doing?’”
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On Wednesday, hundreds of high school prospects will be left holding dozens of meaningless scholarship offers, signing with a school only after other programs, despite offering them a scholarship, never accepted their commitment. Maybe those schools found a better player at that position, or maybe the spots in the class filled up. Some scholarship offers aren’t ever committable, just fancy invitations to a school’s summer camp, while others are only committable for a certain amount of time. In the most egregious cases, coaches rescind offers out to committed prospects, and in other instances, schools strongly suggest that certain commits seek other options. “The coaches mother---- the kids,” says one major college assistant coach who wished to remain anonymous. “It’s the biggest problem in our game right now. It’s bull----.”
Never in the sport’s history have colleges dispersed so many scholarship offers, frivolously doling out hollow promises with the lure of free tuition. Using the 247Sports recruiting database, Sports Illustrated research shows an accelerating trend at the major college level that hit new, disturbing benchmarks this year. The study, covering the last eight recruiting cycles, produced galling figures within college football’s major conferences: more than 101,000 scholarship offers issued in order to fill about 12,000 available scholarships. For the 2019 cycle alone, the 65 programs in Power 5 conferences made more than 15,000 scholarship offers in order to secure what is expected be about 1,600 signees. That’s an average of about 237 offers per school per year, a 100-offer increase from the average in 2012. In what is believed to be a first for a college program, Louisville hit the 400-offer mark in 2017, and six programs have delivered at least 400 offers this year. One-fifth of Power 5 teams handed out at least 300 offers this cycle, for classes that do not often exceed 25 members. Just seven years ago, no school surpassed the 300-offer mark.
“It’s definitely something that’s gotten worse,” says 247Sports scouting director Barton Simmons. “This devalues the offer. Some programs fight to keep the value of their offer up. Other programs maybe don’t see the point of fighting it, and they play the game.”
Using the 247Sports recruiting database, SI compiled the total scholarship offers distributed by each of the 65 Power 5 programs since the 2012 recruiting cycle. Hover over the bar graph to find where your team sits.
Tennessee and Syracuse each distributed more than 440 offers this cycle, which is believed by industry experts to be a record. The Volunteers lead all major college programs in offers over this eight-year stretch (328 per year), followed by Louisville (323), Kentucky (291), Ole Miss (290) and Illinois (283). Rounding out the top 10 are Mississippi State (278), Nebraska (270), Indiana (268), Syracuse (254) and West Virginia (251).
There’s a reason the sport’s bluebloods are missing from the top 10. The schools passing out the most and earliest offers are typically secondary programs in competitive conferences. “They’ve got to get in early to beat the big dogs,” Simmons says. “Others try to create the narrative, ‘We don’t offer as many kids, so ours mean more!’ But that’s really hard to do.” While powerhouses may get to be more selective, some schools don’t have a choice. The two Power 5 programs with the fewest offers distributed since 2012 are private, academically rigorous institutions: Stanford (76 offers per year) and Northwestern (93). “They can’t just throw offers around like candy,” Simmons says.
The disparity within this spectrum is large. Stanford’s cumulative eight-year offer total of 608 is less than half of those delivered by programs in the middle of the rankings, like Michigan State’s 1,542. The Spartans in turn sit more than 1,000 offers behind Tennessee’s nation-leading total (2,627). Offer distribution is not just linked to a team’s historical place within its conference hierarchy; it is often tied to the coach in charge. Coaching changes often spike or dip offer counts drastically depending on the new coach’s recruiting method. For example, Mississippi State distributed 254 offers this year in its first full cycle under Joe Moorhead. That's 99 fewer offers than were doled out in the 2018 class, which Mullen recruited and then passed on to Moorhead when he left for Florida. Coaching changes often send a school’s offer total skyrocketing as new staffs hurriedly distribute offers upon arrival. Nebraska had one of the largest year-to-year increases in offers, from 2018 recruiting class built over Mike Riley’s final season (277 offers) to Scott Frost’s first full year (422). Iowa State went from 218 offers in 2016 under Paul Rhoads to 355 under Matt Campbell, and Jim Harbaugh distributed 101 more offers in his first year at Michigan than predecessor Brady Hoke had the year before.
Coaching changes can be tough for those who thought they had committable offers. “It’s been ridiculous at times,” says Kevin Wright, head coach at IMG Academy, an athletics-geared boarding school in Bradenton, Fla., that has churned out more than 25 major college signees since 2014. “I had a coach last year, new head coach at a Power 5, call me and tell me a kid had an offer from the previous staff and asked me if I’d let him know it would be in his best interest not to accept the previous offer, because if he came, he wasn’t going to play there. The timing is so bad. It was after the college season and before the early signing date.”
Fixing this problem is complicated, and the responsibility doesn’t only rest with college coaches, industry insiders say. The uptick in offers coincides with an increase in decommitments by players. Last year, according to data from 247Sports, more than 600 players pulled their verbal pledge to a school, compared to 113 recorded decommitments in 2014. Even more significant than decommitments are those players who string along programs or delay their commitments. One major college staff member described a scholarship offer as a reservation at a restaurant. “The reservation doesn’t mean s--- until you show up at the restaurant,” he says. “Certain restaurants will hold your table. Others, 30 seconds after you’re not there, will give away your seat.”
In some cases, even early commitments are not accepted. In fact, one major college assistant admits that many of his offers through the years are for kids “to come to camp,” he says. “Then, you have to come on campus, work out and then the wording all of a sudden has changed and it’s not an offer anymore.”
Nick Saban’s Alabama program found itself at the center of this controversy in 2014, when a high school coach in Bossier City, La., barred Crimson Tide staff members from recruiting on his campus. David Feaster revealed during a Baton Rouge radio interview that he had banned Alabama coaches after they did not honor an offer to then Parkway High quarterback Brandon Harris, who eventually played at LSU and then North Carolina. The interview went viral, and Parkway High officials fired Feaster weeks later, citing his decision to shut out the Crimson Tide. Feaster, now offensive coordinator at Glenbrook School, has no regrets. “You have to stand up to it—‘Don’t treat my guys like this,’” Feaster says.
Over the last eight years, Alabama is the only perennial national title contender to land in the top 20 of offers, sitting 18th with an average of 220 per year. Saban’s offer strategy has evolved over the years, as the Crimson Tide have gone from extending 203 offers in 2015 to 287 this year. Saban has company. The SEC leads all conferences in offers per cycle (229 per year per team), significantly outpacing the conference whose teams average the fewest offers, the Big 12 (158). In fact, of the bottom eight Power 5 schools in offers, five are from the Big 12: Texas, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, TCU and Baylor.
The prevalence of uncommittable offers is directly linked to the increasing numbers of offers, which in turn is bolstered by the number prospects who are offered early, some before they enter high school. Harbaugh, for instance, made headlines a few weeks ago by offering a scholarship to seventh-grade quarterback Isaiah Marshall. Schools often race to deliver the first offer to a prospect, a defining moment for any teenage football player. “It’s so fast they don’t know the kids at all,” one assistant coach says. “The worst job in America right now would be a high school coach. You’re coaching a 6'6", 350-pound lineman who needs to lose weight, but he has 25 offers as a sophomore and he doesn’t listen to the high school coach. We’ve created something bad.”
AXSON: Five Key National Signing Day Storylines to Follow
Prospects crave offers, treating them as badges of honor and measuring sticks of their athletic success on par with tournament trophies or championship rings. Recruits, their parents or their handlers often pressure staff members into offering. Well, your rival just offered, so why haven’t you? At one point last year, former Georgia Tech head coach Paul Johnson, now retired, found himself in a meeting with his staff discussing 14- and 15-year-old prospects. He shook his head, looked around the room and, knowing he would soon step down, delivered a message: “I told our guys, ‘Hey, you guys offer all the ninth-graders you want. I don’t care. I won’t be here.’”
Some schools use offers as marketing ploys, offering players they have no chance to land or aren’t serious about just so their school is linked to the player on internet searches, recruiting web pages and social media. “It’s a huge issue, and it continues to snowball,” Wright says. “People are throwing out hundreds of offers out there, because why not? You’re getting publicity.” Uncommittable offers don’t only happen at the prep level, says George Rush, who retired in 2015 after 38 years and a record 326 wins on the junior college level at City College of San Francisco. He’s seen coaches offer his players after their first year of JUCO only to pull the offer following the player’s second season. “I had a guy once cancel every visit he had because he wanted to go there and they dropped them like a hot potato,” Rush says. He’s witnessed several prominent college head coaches pull offers from his players, but he declined to identify them. “It’s names you know,” he says. “Big names. One is an NFL coach now.”
For years, this trend has been seriously discussed in college football’s legislative circles, according to Todd Berry, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. In 2017, the Division I Council tabled a proposal that would prohibit coaches from making verbal offers to prospects before Sept. 1 of their junior year. Berry says one of the goals of the two-year-old early signing period was to curb scholarship offers. “We have been kicking this can down the road for quite some time,” he says.
Officials have considered allowing prospects to immediately sign with a program once an offer is made. Another discussed proposal would insert a month-long window for a prospect to commit to an offer before it expires. Berry says officials have even discussed resurrecting the “conference letter,” something that’s been dead for decades. Conference letters bind a prospect to one school of their choice from each conference. Written offer letters still exist, but they are not binding. Schools can send offer documents to prospects starting Aug. 1 of their senior year of high school. “There’s no more value in a written offer than that of a verbal,” Simmons says.
NIESEN: Five Quarterback Battles to Watch After National Signing Day
For prospects, a written offer is at least a sign of a school’s sincerity. For example, Sheldrick Redwine, a two-year starter for Miami who’s now preparing for the NFL draft, received 33 verbal offers during high school career but got only 10 written offer documents. “Might not mean I have a spot,” he says, “but it feels good to see it in paper.”
Johnson has been outspoken on uncommittable offers. He believes an offer should be made in writing, with attached papers to bind both parties. “That would stop the kids from committing when they weren’t committed, and it would stop the coaches from offering non-committable scholarships,” he says. “That would alleviate all the s---show.”
The media is to blame, too, with its incessant coverage of teenagers’ potential college destinations. “The kids who now get all the attention are the ones who commit and decommit six times,” Johnson says. “The kids who commit and don’t change, they get one minute of fame and that’s it.” Recruiting reporters must wade through this mess, hanging their reputations on the comments of 16- and 17-year-olds while checking facts with college staff members. Prospects sometimes mistake flattery from a coach for an offer in a “miscommunication,” as Simmons says. Other players knowingly lie about an offer. They announce it publicly, often times on social media, only to have a recruiting reporter discover the truth from staff members. “I’ve had young people say that I’d offered them and I’d never had one conversation with them,” says Berry, who coached for 33 years before joining the AFCA in 2016. “Social media has created some challenges.”
The average Power 5 program hands out roughly 200 more scholarship offers than it can follow through on during a recruiting cycle, and the numbers game has real-life consequences.
ROSS DELLENGER
FEB 5, 2019
Foster Moreau considered it “tacky” to commit immediately despite the circumstances: His dream college in his home state had just offered him a scholarship to play football. So he waited a week, then called LSU offensive coordinator Cam Cameron to accept the offer and announced it publicly, taking to Twitter with as much excitement as ever.
This was the only major college offer that had been extended to Moreau, a three-star tight end out of a New Orleans private school, and the fact that his commitment came on Christmas Eve was part of the celebration. “It was awesome,” Moreau recalls. “I was like, ‘Let’s tweet this! It’s going to be a great tweet!’”
While Moreau’s family celebrated his all-expenses-paid future in purple-and-gold, back in Baton Rouge his name was absent from the list of 2015 commitments scribbled on a whiteboard in LSU’s recruiting war room. Only weeks later did Moreau’s high school coach relay a message from the LSU staff: He was not guaranteed a spot after all. His heart sank. He deleted the tweet, and he planned to attend Tulane.
On the morning of National Signing Day, Tricia Moreau allowed her son to sleep in, finally shaking him awake at 10 a.m. He got into the shower like normal and then his phone rang. Suds still in his hair and water trickling off his body, he answered a call that turned his uncommittable offer into a committable one. “I pick up and Les Miles is on the line,” Moreau remembers. “He says, ‘Hey, Foster, how you doing?’”
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On Wednesday, hundreds of high school prospects will be left holding dozens of meaningless scholarship offers, signing with a school only after other programs, despite offering them a scholarship, never accepted their commitment. Maybe those schools found a better player at that position, or maybe the spots in the class filled up. Some scholarship offers aren’t ever committable, just fancy invitations to a school’s summer camp, while others are only committable for a certain amount of time. In the most egregious cases, coaches rescind offers out to committed prospects, and in other instances, schools strongly suggest that certain commits seek other options. “The coaches mother---- the kids,” says one major college assistant coach who wished to remain anonymous. “It’s the biggest problem in our game right now. It’s bull----.”
Never in the sport’s history have colleges dispersed so many scholarship offers, frivolously doling out hollow promises with the lure of free tuition. Using the 247Sports recruiting database, Sports Illustrated research shows an accelerating trend at the major college level that hit new, disturbing benchmarks this year. The study, covering the last eight recruiting cycles, produced galling figures within college football’s major conferences: more than 101,000 scholarship offers issued in order to fill about 12,000 available scholarships. For the 2019 cycle alone, the 65 programs in Power 5 conferences made more than 15,000 scholarship offers in order to secure what is expected be about 1,600 signees. That’s an average of about 237 offers per school per year, a 100-offer increase from the average in 2012. In what is believed to be a first for a college program, Louisville hit the 400-offer mark in 2017, and six programs have delivered at least 400 offers this year. One-fifth of Power 5 teams handed out at least 300 offers this cycle, for classes that do not often exceed 25 members. Just seven years ago, no school surpassed the 300-offer mark.
“It’s definitely something that’s gotten worse,” says 247Sports scouting director Barton Simmons. “This devalues the offer. Some programs fight to keep the value of their offer up. Other programs maybe don’t see the point of fighting it, and they play the game.”
Using the 247Sports recruiting database, SI compiled the total scholarship offers distributed by each of the 65 Power 5 programs since the 2012 recruiting cycle. Hover over the bar graph to find where your team sits.
Tennessee and Syracuse each distributed more than 440 offers this cycle, which is believed by industry experts to be a record. The Volunteers lead all major college programs in offers over this eight-year stretch (328 per year), followed by Louisville (323), Kentucky (291), Ole Miss (290) and Illinois (283). Rounding out the top 10 are Mississippi State (278), Nebraska (270), Indiana (268), Syracuse (254) and West Virginia (251).
There’s a reason the sport’s bluebloods are missing from the top 10. The schools passing out the most and earliest offers are typically secondary programs in competitive conferences. “They’ve got to get in early to beat the big dogs,” Simmons says. “Others try to create the narrative, ‘We don’t offer as many kids, so ours mean more!’ But that’s really hard to do.” While powerhouses may get to be more selective, some schools don’t have a choice. The two Power 5 programs with the fewest offers distributed since 2012 are private, academically rigorous institutions: Stanford (76 offers per year) and Northwestern (93). “They can’t just throw offers around like candy,” Simmons says.
The disparity within this spectrum is large. Stanford’s cumulative eight-year offer total of 608 is less than half of those delivered by programs in the middle of the rankings, like Michigan State’s 1,542. The Spartans in turn sit more than 1,000 offers behind Tennessee’s nation-leading total (2,627). Offer distribution is not just linked to a team’s historical place within its conference hierarchy; it is often tied to the coach in charge. Coaching changes often spike or dip offer counts drastically depending on the new coach’s recruiting method. For example, Mississippi State distributed 254 offers this year in its first full cycle under Joe Moorhead. That's 99 fewer offers than were doled out in the 2018 class, which Mullen recruited and then passed on to Moorhead when he left for Florida. Coaching changes often send a school’s offer total skyrocketing as new staffs hurriedly distribute offers upon arrival. Nebraska had one of the largest year-to-year increases in offers, from 2018 recruiting class built over Mike Riley’s final season (277 offers) to Scott Frost’s first full year (422). Iowa State went from 218 offers in 2016 under Paul Rhoads to 355 under Matt Campbell, and Jim Harbaugh distributed 101 more offers in his first year at Michigan than predecessor Brady Hoke had the year before.
Coaching changes can be tough for those who thought they had committable offers. “It’s been ridiculous at times,” says Kevin Wright, head coach at IMG Academy, an athletics-geared boarding school in Bradenton, Fla., that has churned out more than 25 major college signees since 2014. “I had a coach last year, new head coach at a Power 5, call me and tell me a kid had an offer from the previous staff and asked me if I’d let him know it would be in his best interest not to accept the previous offer, because if he came, he wasn’t going to play there. The timing is so bad. It was after the college season and before the early signing date.”
Fixing this problem is complicated, and the responsibility doesn’t only rest with college coaches, industry insiders say. The uptick in offers coincides with an increase in decommitments by players. Last year, according to data from 247Sports, more than 600 players pulled their verbal pledge to a school, compared to 113 recorded decommitments in 2014. Even more significant than decommitments are those players who string along programs or delay their commitments. One major college staff member described a scholarship offer as a reservation at a restaurant. “The reservation doesn’t mean s--- until you show up at the restaurant,” he says. “Certain restaurants will hold your table. Others, 30 seconds after you’re not there, will give away your seat.”
In some cases, even early commitments are not accepted. In fact, one major college assistant admits that many of his offers through the years are for kids “to come to camp,” he says. “Then, you have to come on campus, work out and then the wording all of a sudden has changed and it’s not an offer anymore.”
Nick Saban’s Alabama program found itself at the center of this controversy in 2014, when a high school coach in Bossier City, La., barred Crimson Tide staff members from recruiting on his campus. David Feaster revealed during a Baton Rouge radio interview that he had banned Alabama coaches after they did not honor an offer to then Parkway High quarterback Brandon Harris, who eventually played at LSU and then North Carolina. The interview went viral, and Parkway High officials fired Feaster weeks later, citing his decision to shut out the Crimson Tide. Feaster, now offensive coordinator at Glenbrook School, has no regrets. “You have to stand up to it—‘Don’t treat my guys like this,’” Feaster says.
Over the last eight years, Alabama is the only perennial national title contender to land in the top 20 of offers, sitting 18th with an average of 220 per year. Saban’s offer strategy has evolved over the years, as the Crimson Tide have gone from extending 203 offers in 2015 to 287 this year. Saban has company. The SEC leads all conferences in offers per cycle (229 per year per team), significantly outpacing the conference whose teams average the fewest offers, the Big 12 (158). In fact, of the bottom eight Power 5 schools in offers, five are from the Big 12: Texas, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, TCU and Baylor.
The prevalence of uncommittable offers is directly linked to the increasing numbers of offers, which in turn is bolstered by the number prospects who are offered early, some before they enter high school. Harbaugh, for instance, made headlines a few weeks ago by offering a scholarship to seventh-grade quarterback Isaiah Marshall. Schools often race to deliver the first offer to a prospect, a defining moment for any teenage football player. “It’s so fast they don’t know the kids at all,” one assistant coach says. “The worst job in America right now would be a high school coach. You’re coaching a 6'6", 350-pound lineman who needs to lose weight, but he has 25 offers as a sophomore and he doesn’t listen to the high school coach. We’ve created something bad.”
AXSON: Five Key National Signing Day Storylines to Follow
Prospects crave offers, treating them as badges of honor and measuring sticks of their athletic success on par with tournament trophies or championship rings. Recruits, their parents or their handlers often pressure staff members into offering. Well, your rival just offered, so why haven’t you? At one point last year, former Georgia Tech head coach Paul Johnson, now retired, found himself in a meeting with his staff discussing 14- and 15-year-old prospects. He shook his head, looked around the room and, knowing he would soon step down, delivered a message: “I told our guys, ‘Hey, you guys offer all the ninth-graders you want. I don’t care. I won’t be here.’”
Some schools use offers as marketing ploys, offering players they have no chance to land or aren’t serious about just so their school is linked to the player on internet searches, recruiting web pages and social media. “It’s a huge issue, and it continues to snowball,” Wright says. “People are throwing out hundreds of offers out there, because why not? You’re getting publicity.” Uncommittable offers don’t only happen at the prep level, says George Rush, who retired in 2015 after 38 years and a record 326 wins on the junior college level at City College of San Francisco. He’s seen coaches offer his players after their first year of JUCO only to pull the offer following the player’s second season. “I had a guy once cancel every visit he had because he wanted to go there and they dropped them like a hot potato,” Rush says. He’s witnessed several prominent college head coaches pull offers from his players, but he declined to identify them. “It’s names you know,” he says. “Big names. One is an NFL coach now.”
For years, this trend has been seriously discussed in college football’s legislative circles, according to Todd Berry, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. In 2017, the Division I Council tabled a proposal that would prohibit coaches from making verbal offers to prospects before Sept. 1 of their junior year. Berry says one of the goals of the two-year-old early signing period was to curb scholarship offers. “We have been kicking this can down the road for quite some time,” he says.
Officials have considered allowing prospects to immediately sign with a program once an offer is made. Another discussed proposal would insert a month-long window for a prospect to commit to an offer before it expires. Berry says officials have even discussed resurrecting the “conference letter,” something that’s been dead for decades. Conference letters bind a prospect to one school of their choice from each conference. Written offer letters still exist, but they are not binding. Schools can send offer documents to prospects starting Aug. 1 of their senior year of high school. “There’s no more value in a written offer than that of a verbal,” Simmons says.
NIESEN: Five Quarterback Battles to Watch After National Signing Day
For prospects, a written offer is at least a sign of a school’s sincerity. For example, Sheldrick Redwine, a two-year starter for Miami who’s now preparing for the NFL draft, received 33 verbal offers during high school career but got only 10 written offer documents. “Might not mean I have a spot,” he says, “but it feels good to see it in paper.”
Johnson has been outspoken on uncommittable offers. He believes an offer should be made in writing, with attached papers to bind both parties. “That would stop the kids from committing when they weren’t committed, and it would stop the coaches from offering non-committable scholarships,” he says. “That would alleviate all the s---show.”
The media is to blame, too, with its incessant coverage of teenagers’ potential college destinations. “The kids who now get all the attention are the ones who commit and decommit six times,” Johnson says. “The kids who commit and don’t change, they get one minute of fame and that’s it.” Recruiting reporters must wade through this mess, hanging their reputations on the comments of 16- and 17-year-olds while checking facts with college staff members. Prospects sometimes mistake flattery from a coach for an offer in a “miscommunication,” as Simmons says. Other players knowingly lie about an offer. They announce it publicly, often times on social media, only to have a recruiting reporter discover the truth from staff members. “I’ve had young people say that I’d offered them and I’d never had one conversation with them,” says Berry, who coached for 33 years before joining the AFCA in 2016. “Social media has created some challenges.”
MNVCGUY
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Thanks for posting, really interesting read. Couple of thoughts on it.
Players making verbal commitments and backing out is a huge part of this issue. Schools have to cover themselves for when guys decommit. That said, schools issuing uncommittable offers is BS as well. If an offer is uncommitable then it shouldn't be viewed as an offer.
Plenty of blame to go around for coaches, players, fans and media for the madness that is recruiting now. Only way I can see to fix it would be to make verbal commitments binding unless there is a mutually agreed upon reason to cancel it. In other words if the school offers and the player commits then both parties have to agree to cancel the commitment. But of course that would open up a whole bunch of legal issues and I am sure would be next to impossible to legislate.
WriterGoph
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What I want to know is of those 440 offers Tennessee gave out, how many were getting the McDonald's bag with the cash in it?
How much do P5 players earn per month?
WriterGoph
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I don't see the relevance to my question. Tennessee was just outed this week for having a bag man for recruits. Nothing to do with players on the team
tmvander
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If I'm a high school recruit and someone offers me an uncommittable offer I'm not taking it seriously. That offer goes to the bottom of the pile of schools I'm interested in. I know there are plenty of reasons kids won't view things this way, but that's just how I'd approach it or have my kid approach it.
Pete smith
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The answer is to eliminate the idea of a “verbal” commitment. If he/she has considered all the offers and determines where to sign, then sign. No reason to have a “big” signing date predetermined by the NCAA. If the athlete is sure, get the pen and paper.
A_Slab_of_Bacon
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Yeah,I think the only reason it really works is ... the kid really wants to play there and his other offers are in North Dakota, or St. Thomas and really backwater programs like that.
At that point you might wait out a 'non committable' offer ...
MaxyJR1
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non committable really means that the staff has stipulations to meet before becoming committable. Grades, on campus visit, health, etc. etc. The non committalbe is saying let's get to know each other.
A_Slab_of_Bacon
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I think it usually means that the staff is waiting on a better player to take the spot or not ... and once that guy decides the offer becomes comittable or not.
btowngopher
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That would really make things interesting if you could sign someone at any time. My first instinct on it is that talent would end up less filtered down to the few power houses. The best talent evaluators would be rewarded.
hungan1
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It's a two way street.
Programs have only a handful of commitable offers to dole out. So, many are non- commitable. They have to hedge their bets that committed players back don't out of at the very last minute like Frank Ragnow did. For some players, they may be facing eligibility and/or admissions issues.
Players may want to secure a commitable offer while they wait for an offer from their dream school. Sort of like Avante Dickerson's situation.
As long as there is honesty both ways, why not.
I would think the Gophers coaching staff always have a Plan B player.
Does anybody look at how many offers the Gophers each recruiting cycle?
Programs have only a handful of commitable offers to dole out. So, many are non- commitable. They have to hedge their bets that committed players back don't out of at the very last minute like Frank Ragnow did. For some players, they may be facing eligibility and/or admissions issues.
Players may want to secure a commitable offer while they wait for an offer from their dream school. Sort of like Avante Dickerson's situation.
As long as there is honesty both ways, why not.
I would think the Gophers coaching staff always have a Plan B player.
Does anybody look at how many offers the Gophers each recruiting cycle?
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MNVCGUY
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Personally I think the whole concept of a signing day is really outdated at this point. Would love it if there was a start and end date where you could sign guys for a particular class and then just let kids sign whenever they are ready.
Maybe combine it with a process for mutual withdrawal of the signed NLI for those instances when a kid has a change of heart and the team is ok with letting them out of their commitment. Make the idea of an offer from the school and a commitment from the player actually mean something.
Players who know where they want to go could be 100% done with the recruiting process and not have to deal with coaches trying to change their mind all the way up to signing day. Was really glad football put in the early signing day but really don't see why you couldn't just eliminate signing day all together and just say between like September 1st of your senior year and February 5th (random dates) you can sign anytime you want to (if you have a valid offer from the school and they have space available in their class).
Put some pressure on schools to only offer kids they 100% want and put some meaning behind a kid committing to a school as opposed to just using their verbal as a placeholder. I'm sure it will never happen but I would be all for it.
MplsGopher
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Bolded: good point.
But obviously there is a difference between making, say, 75 formal offers (for 25 spots) ... and making 400 formal offers (someone mentioned Tennessee was at 440).
MplsGopher
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How many die-hard Tennessee football fans out there, desperate to get the Vols back to the Peyton glory days, would be willing to come up with a couple thousand in cash and slip it to a guy who they thought could make it happen?
I suspect many.
MplsGopher
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I doubt it's like Fleck gets on the Zoom meeting with the guy and says "I wanted to give you the good news myself that we're going to be making an uncommitable offer to you! We like you, but we aren't sure how much we like you! There are other guys we'd rather have, but we aren't sure if we can land them, so we wanted to make sure we got an "offer" to you! Row the boat!"
My wild guess is that initially/early in the process all offers are treated like they are the guy.
Guessing it can be quite a vicious game of musical chairs, as to when the top of the food chain (both recruits and schools) do a dance and then start pairing off, and it goes "down" from there.
tmvander
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Right. Maybe the communication is we're going to extend you this offer in the event that you meet A, B, C expectations whether those are academic, weight, whatever.
BleedGopher
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Go Gophers!!
salzie
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bummer
MplsGopher
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Sounds like Oregon. Wish him well
btowngopher
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They were addressed pretty well last year. I’d rather take a transfer cb or safety at this point, already have a lot of young guys.
MNVCGUY
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Posted this in the Dickerson thread but probably fits better over here. Below is how our class stacks up against Nebraska's on paper. I have seen some people getting upset about our class being ranked 8th in the conference, but when I look at the breakdown below, to me it really underscores the flaw in the team rankings. I just don't see how you could look at our class in relation to Nebraska's and feel like there is a major talent gap of any kind between the classes. Most would be thrilled with a top 20 class in the nation and a top 5 class in the BIG and yet at the same time there have been complaints about being 8th like the class just isn't good enough:
Nebraska - #20 National - #5 BIG - 20 recruits - four 4* - sixteen 3* - avg rank 87.64
Minnesota - #35 National - #8 BIG - 18 recruits - four 4* - fourteen 3* avg rank 87.09
People would be jumping for joy at the #20 class in the country but look at #35 as a disappointment. Look at the breakdown on those two classes, are we really going to pretend there is some massive difference there? If I stripped away the team names and rankings, would anyone expect those two classes to be 15 spots apart?
Losing Dickerson sucks but it doesn't drastically shift the value of this class and it doesn't make in inferior to the vast majority of the classes in the Big Ten. There are still 2 elite classes in the conference (Ohio State, Michigan) and then there is not a ton of separation between the rest of the conference.
The talent we are brining in is very comparable on paper to the talent our rivals in the West are bringing in. What happens when those players arrive on campus is what really matters.
Nebraska - #20 National - #5 BIG - 20 recruits - four 4* - sixteen 3* - avg rank 87.64
Minnesota - #35 National - #8 BIG - 18 recruits - four 4* - fourteen 3* avg rank 87.09
People would be jumping for joy at the #20 class in the country but look at #35 as a disappointment. Look at the breakdown on those two classes, are we really going to pretend there is some massive difference there? If I stripped away the team names and rankings, would anyone expect those two classes to be 15 spots apart?
Losing Dickerson sucks but it doesn't drastically shift the value of this class and it doesn't make in inferior to the vast majority of the classes in the Big Ten. There are still 2 elite classes in the conference (Ohio State, Michigan) and then there is not a ton of separation between the rest of the conference.
The talent we are brining in is very comparable on paper to the talent our rivals in the West are bringing in. What happens when those players arrive on campus is what really matters.
gophereric30
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What does dickerson going to Oregon have to do with Nebraska? Thanks for the breakdown though!
MNVCGUY
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Dickerson leaving dropped our class ranking down some. I just used Nebraska's class to illustrate the point that our #8 in the Big Ten is very comparable with a class currently ranked in the top 20 Nationally and in the top 5 of the conference.
tmvander
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I called this out a few months back as well. Really the difference between rank 15-50 in the recruiting rankings is like 1 or 2 highly rated guys or having more commits. It's crazy when I read in the media how the gophers recruiting class is "only at 35" or whatever it is in that year. Literally if they sign 1 more low 3* guy they might jump 3-5 spots.
die hard gopher
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Well, the gophers had the #24 class with Avante and #35 without Avante.
So the difference between the two classes is a little more than an Avante caliber player. And Avante was a composite top #125 guy which would be one of our top 3 or 4 all time highest guys.
I would say thats a pretty big difference.
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