The University of Georgia football team's practice field sits empty except for a handful of construction workers in Athens, Ga.
Photo: Joshua L. Jones/Associated PressThe first game of the 2020 college football season is still five months away, but the sport is already reeling from the NCAA’s unprecedented decision to cancel athletics for the 2019-20 academic year.
Springtime gridiron traditions have ground to a halt and the regular hum of the recruiting cycle has fallen silent. These disruptions could drastically change where and when prospective athletes choose to sign, potentially remaking the balance of power in the sport for years to come.
“There’s so much uncertainty still,” said Dave Emerick, Mississippi State’s senior associate athletic director for football. “We’re kind of taking it one day at a time.”
Typically, the spring months are a crucial evaluation period in football. Programs hold practices and stage intrasquad games to preview their depth charts. Freshmen who enrolled early—a practice that is strongly encouraged at powerhouse programs—can get up to speed with the playbook far ahead of the season.
But a bigger problem may be preparing for 2021 and beyond. College football coaches who are paid to be good in a recruit’s living room are indefinitely barred from living rooms thanks to the pandemic. They can’t fan out across the country to coax verbal commitments out of elite prospects for the following year’s class.
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It’s especially problematic because of changes to the recruiting calendar the NCAA introduced in recent years. In 2017, it introduced an “early signing period” that allows top prospects to sign with a school in December rather than February.
But this year, a new NCAA rule intended to depressurize the recruiting calendar turned February into a “dead period” during which coaches were barred from visiting or initiating contact with recruits. When the NCAA canceled sports on March 13, it imposed another dead period until April 15.
On Wednesday, the NCAA extended the restrictions to May 31 and left open the possibility of further extensions. Recruiting for the Class of 2021—whose signing period is supposed to begin in about eight months—is on indefinite hiatus.
“This should not be a time when people are focused on competitive advantage and one-upmanship,” said Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The delay means that football staffs have effectively lost more than three months of time to forge valuable in-person relationships with recruits. Coaches believe they have to be courting prospects now in order to get the results they want when the “early signing period” for 2021 recruits begins in December.
Since the early signing period was introduced in 2017, signing a national letter of intent in mid-December—as opposed to the first Wednesday in February—has taken on outsized importance. In 2019, about 80% of top prospects knew where they would attend college by the time bowl games rolled around.
At Ohio State, former head coach Urban Meyer signed 21 players in December in 2017, his final year of coaching in Columbus. In 2018, despite being named head coach just 15 days earlier, Ryan Day signed 15. Last December he inked 24 players, saying “that’s a full class right there.” Only one more player joined the roster on National Signing Day on February 5, 2020.
That trend was expected to accelerate across college football until the NCAA’s coronavirus-related cancellations materialized.
Now there is talk among coaches of eliminating the early signing period for 2020 altogether. Texas coach Tom Herman believes the NCAA should consider such a move. “That would allow the prospects to take a deep breath and to give the recruiting process some added time since December has become the primary signing day at this point,” he wrote in an email.
Ohio State coach Ryan Day said he is open to the idea as well if the Buckeyes can’t “get things up and going in May and June.”
For now, coaches are still crossing their fingers that they’ll be able to invite recruits to campus come June 1, the first day the NCAA permits high school juniors to make official visits. Herman is cautiously optimistic.
“We’re still working with the hope that we’ll be in a position to have on-campus visits starting June 1, which will let us have those critical face-to-face interactions,” he wrote. “If we find out that will change at any point…that will be a big factor in our recruiting process.”
Some coaches are worried that the extended dead period will give the schools that made the strongest impressions on high schoolers the earliest will get the upper hand when it comes time to sign national letters of intent.
“I think kids, they’re young, they’re impressionable, they’re not always the most patient. At some point in time they may just get sick of waiting and defer to what they’ve already seen and what they already know,” said Emerick of Mississippi State. “It’s probably happening a little bit already.”
That may be staying closer to home for some recruits, according to Brenton Sullivan, chief executive at online recruiting platform FieldLevel.
“There’s going to be a shift toward local,” he said. “What that’s going to do is, the schools that were pulling athletes from all over the country are maybe going to lose out on some of those recruits, because they’re going to stay home.”
This trend could be damaging for top tier programs on the Eastern Seaboard—the Clemsons and Alabamas of the world—who have made inroads with talent pipelines on the West Coast in recent years.
Recruiting disruptions are of particular concern at schools that underwent coaching changes in the off-season. At Mississippi State, which hired coach Mike Leach away from Washington State in mid-January, the staff got just two weeks in January and two weeks in early March to build valuable face-to-face relationships with players in the Class to 2021. Longer tenured coaches, on the other hand, got up to 2.5 years.
“I think if you’ve been at a place for a while where a bunch of underclassmen have seen your campus in the past, you’re probably at a little bit of an advantage,” said Emerick.
Until there is an end in sight to the nationwide lockdown, however, much of the questions surrounding college football will remain. Per Ohio State’s Day, “I think it’s hard to project what some of the major issues are going to be until we know how long we are in this.”
Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com
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