Mike Gundy, Urban Meyer and the Recruiting Process

I meant to post this before, well, the middle of March but hey, at least it’s not June? I was intrigued by some comments from Mike Gundy around National Signing Day on an early signing period and why he’s long been a proponent of it.

“We’re seeing players that have multiple de-commitments,” Gundy told Go Pokes. “I think the only solution is some sort of an early signing. I suggested June 1 because the middle part of June and July is when coaches take vacation. If we disrupt the recruiting pattern much more prior to coaches going on vacation in the summer then it becomes a 12-month out of the year profession and I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone that’s trying to raise children and have some sort of life outside football.”

Far be it from Gundy to have to work 12 months of the year like the rest of us.[1. I kid.]

“We have to come up with plans to make this a little bit better,” Gundy added. “My feeling is that if a young man wants to go to a school and the school has offered that scholarship then you need to go ahead and get them signed up in June.”

“The follow-up could be a potential December 12 or 18 signing date that would follow the junior college pattern and then on whatever that first Wednesday is in February. The reason I would lean toward that is because of the communication we have in the world today with Twitter and internet and social media the ability to sign players is better than it ever had been in that we can send forms and they can scan and sign them and send them back.”

This makes sense for Gundy. Think about how different his class would have looked if he had been able to sign a couple of guys, say, last July and then clean up at the end with Keondre Wudtee and Calvin Bundage. Now the flip side of this is that maybe Wudtee and Bundage are playing somewhere else as well.

But for Tier 2 (3?) programs like Oklahoma State, there’s not an advantage to early recruiting. Why? Well, because OU is just going to win the Big 12, go to the CFB Playoff and get guys at the end because of it anyway.

Urban Meyer basically said that when he recently talked about an early signing period.

“I’m not a fan of that,” Meyer told Cleveland.com. “You’re moving it just forward and forward, what if a kid wants to change his mind? (If) he wants to change his mind because of coaching changes or other circumstances, the player should be allowed to change his mind.”

Of course you aren’t, Urban! When you run a Tier 1 program, you know you don’t have to work as hard in the summer and fall because if you call a dude at the end of January and say, “jump,” that dude says, “how high, coach and beat the team up north.”

I’m not sure where I land on this. I know I wasn’t ready to make a decision like where to play college ball in February of my senior year, but I was even less ready to do it in June at the end of my junior year. It seems like we’re thinking about what’s best for programs and not kids which, I guess, makes sense. But is also the unintended consequence of running a multi-billion dollar industry still operating under the guise of an amateur sport.