Signing Day Used to Matter. Now College Football Needs Bigger Changes

National Signing Day has lost its meaning as the early signing period and transfer portal overload college football’s calendar.

Lo'Kavion Jackson, a three-star safety at Mosley High School in Panama City, Fla., talks with the News Herald after committing to Mississippi State University on National Signing Day Dec. 4, 2024. | Tyler Orsburn/News Herald / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Wednesday is National Signing Day, a day that used to be one of the busiest, highly-anticipated days on the college football calendar.

It’s the day that high school seniors sign scholarship offers with their chosen school and used to be a day full of signing day parties and hat selection ceremonies.

Don’t expect all of that pomp and circumstance tomorrow.

Most of the excitement of the old signing days takes place during the early signing period in the first week of December.

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There are a few positive benefits to having the early signing period, like more high school signees can enroll in school for the spring semester and participate in spring practices. It also removes two months of time other coaches could try to flip a recruit’s commitment.

Lessening the excitement of the February signing day is an acceptable casualty. Or at least then it was.

Now, having the early signing period is one of the things that makes November and December on the college football calendar one of the busiest times of the year.

In addition to the early signing period, coaches are preparing for bowl and playoff games, looking for or accepting a new job at a different school, retaining key players to return the following season and begin recruiting players who will be in the transfer portal. (Yes, that’s tampering but it’d be naïve to pretend it doesn’t happen.)

Listening to how many coaches talked about the calendar being the cause for many of the dramatic, soap opera-style coaching changes and other controversies, one could easily think the early signing day period should be moved.

After all, it’s not like having the early signing period removed all the cases of recruits flipping commitments in the lead up to National Signing Day. It just happens earlier.

And pushing the early signing period back doesn’t solve any problems. It’d actually add one, making it harder for high school signees to enroll early and participate in spring practices, getting a jump start on their development.

One option would be to move up the early signing day period to before the football season begins for both high schools and colleges. The problem there is it would require coaches and recruits to make decisions without the benefit of the results of the senior.

What if a recruit has a bad season and schools lose interest? What if an lesser-rated recruit has a monster senior season that attracts bigger schools? What if a coach is fired and a recruit doesn’t want to play at that school anymore?

There is no easy answer and there isn’t going to be answer here. No, the point is that as fans, media, administrators, commissioners, coaches and players talk about the changes needed, they need to talk about wholesale changes.

And factors like recruits flipping commitments shouldn’t be considered. Neither should tampering because, spoiler alert, there’s nothing that can be done to end either of those things.

Changes need to be made to when the season starts and ends. Playoffs might need to remove the bye weeks. The transfer portal might need to be pushed back. Or bring back the single national signing day and allow schools to have camps for incoming freshman like the NFL has for rookie minicamps.

But all of those things have negatives, too. But they’re negatives we’ll have to live with.

At some point, college football has to stop rearranging the deck chairs and start rethinking the ship. The sport doesn’t need another minor adjustment to signing day; it needs a calendar built for the modern era, one that acknowledges the realities of the portal, NIL, coaching movement and the year‑round grind this has all become.

Every solution will come with drawbacks, but pretending the current setup is sustainable is the biggest drawback of all. If the sport wants sanity back, it’s going to have to earn it — and that starts with real, structural change, not another Band‑Aid.