National signing day has come and gone, but the challenge is just beginning for Lincoln Riley
Lincoln Riley and the Oklahoma coaching staff are no doubt breathing a collective sigh of relief this morning.
With national signing day in the books, the Sooners have added 16 top football prospects from across the country, and while they may claim a few more signees in February, the heat of the recruiting cycle is effectively over.
And as he addressed the media Wednesday, Riley heaped praise upon his staff for their tireless work amidst the pandemonium of a pandemic.
"[We] had to adapt to do some things that have never been done before to continue to make that process as real as we could for these players, these families," said the Oklahoma head coach. "It took everyone in this building. Everybody had to come together. Everybody had to take on new roles. Everybody had to think outside the box. Our people really worked hard throughout the pandemic, throughout the quarantine and throughout the season to do what we did today and to hopefully be able to continue to do in the future as we continue to build this class."
And build it they did. Oklahoma entered the grave uncertainty of the pandemic with just three commits: Ethan Downs, Cody Jackson and Cullen Montgomery. When all is said and done, the Sooners could have upwards of 20 signees in the class of 2021. Thanks to lightning-quick evolution that deftly accommodated the challenges of the Zoom era, Riley and company proved as effective on the virtual trail as any staff in the nation.
However, when it comes to the ramifications of the pandemic, no one is out of the woods by a long shot. National signing day didn't mark the end of the turmoil that the year 2020 spawned.
As Riley prepares for life after COVID-19, one of his paramount concerns is scholarship management. FBS institutions are only allowed 85 football scholarships, and the NCAA-mandated eligibility freeze granted an extra year of competition to all collegiate football players active in 2020. The resultant problem is evident: take, for example, a program that planned on losing 15 graduating seniors after the 2020 season. Naturally, that program would recruit and sign something in the neighborhood of 15 new student-athletes. But say they sign those 15 new prospects, and then 10 of the 15 seniors already in the program decide to exercise their extra year of eligibility and return in 2021. All of a sudden, there exists a significant surplus of scholarship players, some of whom will have to be cut from the program to meet NCAA regulations.
Could this be a problem? Riley answered yes, but he also emphasized that he'd taken it into consideration long before the signing period.
"It definitely could. It's probably going to," said Riley. "[So] the pandemic, we didn't want that to be an excuse for bringing in people here that we didn't properly vet. And so I think all those things combined led us to say, 'You know what, we're going to have our targets, we're going to go after these guys, [and] if we don't get them we're not going to go reaching.' "
It's far too early to project how many seniors could return for an extra year, and the Sooners will almost certainly lose a few non-seniors such as Ronnie Perkins and Creed Humphrey to the NFL draft. The NCAA will also implement provisions on scholarship limitations in 2021 to help programs adjust in the aftermath of COVID-19, so the true trickle-down effect of the pandemic may not be felt in full until 2022. With that in mind, Riley didn't want to compound the problem by creating another one with a massive 2021 signing class, and he feels as though the mission was accomplished in that regard.
"We're gonna have chances to sign more guys in February," said Riley. "We're gonna have chances to, you know, with transfer portal and immediate eligibility and all that comes with all that, we're going to have our opportunity to go through the process the right way with these people and fill the roster in the correct way. The thing we didn’t want to do is get out ahead of ourselves, and I don’t feel like we did."
Maintaining a roster of 85 scholarship players isn't going to be easy for most Power 5 institutions, and it's going to be a problem that reverberates throughout those programs for several years. But Riley, ever the forward thinker, is fully cognizant of that reality. His responsibility as a head coach promises to be as convoluted and nuanced as ever in the wake of the pandemic that shook the globe. Nevertheless, he's taking it in stride.
"Yeah, the scholarship situation, and what that’s going to be like, you get the exceptions next year," Riley acknowledged. "But after that, it’s going to get messy. So you gotta be thinking ahead, and we’ve certainly tried to do that."
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