Wednesday is National Signing Day, once one of the busiest, most anticipated dates on the college football calendar. It used to be a spectacle of ceremonies, hat dances and celebration as high school seniors made their choices official.
Don’t expect to see any of that today.
Most of the old excitement now happens during the early signing period in December. And to be fair, the early window has real benefits: more signees can enroll in January, join spring practice and get a head start, and it shortens the time other programs can try to flip commitments. Losing some February drama felt like a reasonable trade-off.
At least it did then.
Today, the early signing period is one of the main reasons November and December have become the sport’s most chaotic months. Coaches are juggling bowl prep, playoff prep, job changes, roster retention, and — let’s be honest — early portal recruiting. It’s no wonder so many of them blame the calendar for the soap‑opera coaching moves and controversies that now define the sport’s winter.
But moving the early signing period isn’t a solution. It hasn’t stopped commitment flips; it just shifted them earlier. And pushing the date back would only make early enrollment harder, slowing player development.
Some have suggested moving the early period to before the high school and college seasons. But that forces decisions without senior‑year results. What happens when a recruit struggles and schools cool? Or when a late bloomer earns bigger offers? Or when a coach is fired and a player wants out? The unintended consequences pile up quickly.
There’s no simple fix — and this isn’t an attempt to offer one. The point is that the conversation needs to be bigger than signing‑day tweaks. Commitment flips and tampering aren’t going away, no matter what the calendar looks like, so they shouldn’t drive the debate.
The sport needs to rethink the entire schedule. Maybe the season needs to start or end earlier. Maybe the expanded playoff should eliminate bye weeks. Maybe the transfer‑portal window should shift. Maybe we return to a single signing day and allow schools to run freshman camps, NFL‑style.
Every option has drawbacks. But the status quo is the biggest drawback of all.
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; it needs a calendar built for the realities of the portal, NIL, coaching movement and the year‑round grind this has become. If college football wants sanity back, it will have to earn it — and that starts with real, structural change, not another Band‑Aid.
