Well, loyal readers, this is it. This is the week of National Signing Day. You thought Sunday was big? Katy Perry? She was big, no doubt, but nothing that happened Sunday will match the nervous excitement, the energy, the spectacle of fax machines churning out paper on Wednesday. February 4, 2015, is Opening Day, if you will, of the end of the college football recruiting period, and the day on which the nation’s elite athletes will use a fax machine for the first, and likely last, time of their lives. You’ll be able to follow all the Notre Dame action here.
National Signing Day is weird, the aforementioned primacy of the fax machine notwithstanding. Remember how you sat in your dorm room in college and waited for the phone to ring, waiting for that certain someone to call? And how, if you lived in Dillon, it never rang and you just sat there in your filth and misery and pretended that you didn’t, in fact, need the company of other people, and video games were more than enough, thanks? Distilled to its essence, that’s National Signing Day. We’re all going to wait around for some high school guy to fax us and if he doesn’t fax right away, we’re going to start getting nervous and upset.
Author’s note: faxing is not required by rule.
What we’ll all be waiting on is something called a National Letter of Intent. A NLI is a binding agreement between the player and the school, which commits the player to attend the school, not play for a particular coach, for one year and commits the school to one year of academic aid. A player who breaks his NLI is subjected to a one year penalty. Unless his name is Eddie Vanderdoes. The NLI program is run separately from the NCAA and participation in the program is voluntary for schools and players.
In case you didn’t know, schools canNOT award a four or five year athletic scholarship and must inform the player on or before July 1 if they are not going to kept on scholarship. It is Notre Dame’s general practice that it “does not reduce, cancel or non-renew athletics aid due to injury or athletic performance.” But what about the other guys?
The other guys play fast and loose with math and with the futures of their athletes. By NCAA rule, for what that’s worth, a school is limited to 25 scholarships per year, so long as the total number of players on the team does not exceed 85. The Irish respect that rule pretty well, with 22 commits going into Wednesday, 23 in 2014, 24 in 2013, 18 in 2012, 24 in 2011, and 23 in 2010. The SEC, for one, does not. In 2014, for example, Tennessee signed thirty-five players. As of Sunday afternoon, they have 29 commits. In 2013, they signed 21 payers. So how do they get away with it?
“Grayshirting” is one way to do it. You’ve heard of “red-shirting,” no doubt, but if you haven’t heard of grayshirting, you will on Wednesday. Basically, grayshirting is a practice whereby a recruit either skips out on his fall semester altogether or attends on his own dime and without playing, only taking his scholarship at the start of the spring semester, thereby delaying the start of his five years of NCAA-sanctioned eligibility. Now, according to the rule, if the athlete signs his National Letter of Intent and the school asks him to grayshirt, the athlete is entitled to say “no,” attend school and get his scholarship or go elsewhere with no penalty. Thus, the practice is voluntary on the athlete’s part, but, at least one college A.D. has described it as morally “reprehensible” where clear offers turn “gray” only at the last minute, a classic “bait-and-switch” that puts the student and his family in a quandary.
Another trick is to count “early enrollees” against the previous year’s class. This, and attrition, natural or otherwise, allows a program to manage its numbers, both insofar as the year and program limits are concerned. One of the challenges faced by the Irish on the recruiting trail is the program’s respect for Notre Dame’s commitment to educating its students and getting them their degree. Coach Kelly has been highly public about the importance of graduating, so an offer from Notre Dame has teeth. Those teeth bite at Notre Dame’s ability to sign players, but that’s a good thing in my opinion.
So, enjoy Wednesday morning as the first step in another process of winning one for the Gipper. And maybe as your last chance to see a fax machine at work.
Hating Hurricanes Since 1990.
Bayou Irish is a Jersey boy and Double Domer who fell under New Orleans' spell in 1995. He's been through Katrina and fourteen years in the Coast Guard, so we cut him some slack, mostly in the form of HLS-subsidized sazeracs. But, when he's not face down on the bar and communing with the ghosts of Faulkner and Capote at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone, he's our man in SEC-land, doing his best to convince everyone around him that Graduation Success Rate is a better indicator of success than the number of MNC's won in the last five years.
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