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HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - There have been significant changes to the recruiting landscape in the last year with the early signing period taking a huge chunk of top prospects off the board in December instead of February and earlier official visits happening in the spring.

It’s a strange time in the recruiting world with a lot of unknowns. Coaches are still trying to figure it all out. It’s also a time where the question of just how valuable is an offer if schools are sending out hundreds of them is now worthy of being asked - and plenty of Pac-12 coaches talked about this seemingly new phenomenon in an ever-changing recruiting landscape.

According to Blair Sanderson of HawkeyeReport.com, one Big Ten school has already eclipsed 400 offers in the 2019 class alone. As of late June, an ACC program was at 371. Three SEC teams had 331 or more offers out. In total, eight schools had offered 300 or more prospects; 29 schools had offered 200 or more.

Those numbers are constantly fluctuating, almost always trending upward, since the entry of an offer into the Rivals.com database can be made after a player announces he has received an offer on social media, a high school or 7-on-7 coach alerts a reporter or a family member informs Rivals employees that an offer has been extended. It’s rare but not unheard of for prospects to inflate their offer list. College coaches cannot talk about which prospects their particular school offered on the record and it would be nearly impossible to check an entire offer list with each school on background.

To Stanford coach David Shaw, the high-flying numbers are mind-boggling and outrageous, and he said it “100 percent” devalues the meaning of an offer. According to the Rivals.com database, Stanford has offered 70 prospects, which would be No. 65 on the Power Five list tallied by Sanderson.

“They're not real offers,” Shaw said. “If you've got 20 spots and you offer 300 kids, what have you done? I still don't know. I don't understand it. Because that tells me that 280 of those kids can't commit, so it's not a real offer. What have we actually done?

“... I don't like to over-offer, because every offer from me is a real Stanford offer that a young man can commit to. So if I have 18 spots, I'm not going to offer 40 guys, you know? We might offer a little over 18, because there are a lot of guys that have to do some academic work that are maybe not quite there yet but to offer five, ten, twenty times the number?”

First-year Oregon coach Mario Cristobal has been obliterating his competition on the recruiting trail since arriving in Eugene. The Ducks have the best class in the Pac-12 by a whopping margin, the fifth-best class nationally and Oregon has one fewer four-star pledge in its class than the rest of the conference combined.

Oregon is also one of the schools that has offered a significant number of prospects in this class according to the Rivals.com database but it certainly has not hindered any recruiting success. The coaching staff’s aggressiveness and relationship-building practices have paid off in a huge way for this Oregon class.

“Talent acquisition is always going to be one of the three parts that’s going to make a program what it is,” Cristobal said. “We’re very aggressive when we identify somebody we see really fits us at Oregon, what we want to be, what we want to become.

“Part of being aggressive is being very real. We’re very real, very genuine when we attack this process but when we see somebody that we feel needs to be at Oregon, we’re going to get after it. I wouldn’t put a limit on talent as it relates to your program. If you identify somebody who you believe is really and truly good for your program, I think you go for it. The question is how young should a guy be offered?”

Cristobal told a story of watching a YouTube video recently of an 8-year-old playing rugby - and that this kid might be somebody to watch in the coming years for football but there should be an age limit on when football offers go out.

“If there’s a better rugby player at that age around the country, I’d be shocked,” Cristobal said. “Are we going to offer him? No. We’d rather see him get to high school first.”

Others don’t wait that long. According to the Rivals.com database, there are 50 prospects that report offers in the 2022 class - those are incoming freshmen who haven’t even started high school yet. Three prospects in the 2023 class, rising eighth-graders, report offers including ones from Miami and Michigan.

South Carolina four-star quarterback commit Ryan Hilinski saw his recruitment ramp up quickly this offseason. He had a nice offer list in his junior season. Now he has two dozen offers.

“When it first started, there were a couple schools in the Pac-12 that offered me a scholarship and it was kind of, ‘OK, here’s a scholarship, we’re just jumping on the train,’” Hilinski said. “It was that type of thing. Like an alumnus asked us, ‘Hey, why didn’t we offer this kid?’ That type of deal. But as that progressed and I got more clout, some of the offers were, ‘Hey, we really want you here,’ and those schools that offered me and were jumping on the train called back and said they really wanted me.”

And neither Hilinski, nor 2020 four-star stud running back Kendall Milton seemed to care one iota about how many offers each school recruiting them sent out to other prospects. Hilinski said it was position-specific and Milton said he is only concerned with finding the best place - not if a coach offered 1,000 other kids.

Said Hilinski: “That’s in the back of your mind, if they offer 20 QBs before you, it’s like why are you the 20th QB? But South Carolina reiterated I was on the top of their board and they wanted me there. I just wanted to go to a place where I fit best and they wanted me and I know they haven’t offered a bunch of QBs.”

Milton said: “Every offer felt like it was committable. For me choosing a school, I was looking for the best opportunity for me. It was the coaches and what school can get me to my goal, which is the NFL. .... I don’t really look when it comes to schools offering other people. I focus on me because it’s my decision and I don’t think how many kids they offered or which kids they offered.”

For Cristobal, he’s trying to rebuild Oregon’s program to national prominence. He does not have a vast in-state recruiting territory. The Ducks must hit Southern California and other talent-rich areas to compete on a national scale.

That might mean more offers. That might mean earlier offers. But Cristobal is not going to back down when it come to trying to build a winning team.

“Once a guy gets to high school in his first couple years, you have a pretty good idea what he can do and even more important you find out what’s his makeup and what kind of character does he have, does he do the right things, does he have the right DNA, all those things we take a deep dive into when we’re investigating and looking into a player we want to sign,” Cristobal said.

“Recruiting is the lifeline of your program. It has to be addressed every single day. A lot of times programs are year two or year three and they realize we have to fix this. It’s too late. … I’ve studied just about every program in the country, what they do, how they do it, why they do it that way and tailor it to fit us. Credit to our staff. I can’t say enough about Joe Salave’a and Keith Heyward and Marcus Arroyo and (Jim) Mastro, all these guys, they get after it. They get after it and they’re genuine. They don’t try to put on a show. Hopefully, it will translate to some pretty good recruiting for us.”

It already has.

Blair Sanderson contributed to this report.