Recruiting 101: The offer

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Recruiting is known as the “lifeblood” of a college football program, but the complexity of the process can be confusing for prospects and college football fans alike. In our Recruiting 101 series, we will look to clarify some basic topics and explain more advanced topics about college football recruiting, while also answering those questions you have been afraid to ask. This week’s topic is about the scholarship offer.

Scholarship offers are the currency of college football recruiting. Values of these offers can exceed $200,000 over the course of a college career and afford athletes the opportunity to study at some of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions. In this analysis, we will be looking exclusively at the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) level, where offers are for full-ride scholarships, covering, at minimum, tuition, books, room and board.

MORE RECRUITING 101: The calendar

There are two ways colleges convey scholarship offers to Prospective Student-Athletes (PSAs): written and verbal. Neither, however, is binding and the only value provided by an offer comes from the word of the coach(es) that issued it.

The other difference between written and verbal offers is that only written offers are regulated by the NCAA. Originally, written offers were allowed to be sent to PSAs on Sept. 1 of their junior year of high school. However, in 2010 the NCAA moved that date back to Aug. 1 of a PSA’s senior year.

The NCAA’s reasons for moving the date was two-fold: 1) the assumption that it would eliminate confusion with PSAs who perceived the written offer as a binding agreement, and 2) to slow down a recruiting process that had been starting earlier and earlier in PSA’s high school, and even middle school, careers.

Neither objective has been achieved.

As it relates to eliminating confusion, I have covered college football recruiting since 2003 and the suggestion that PSAs were confusing written offers as binding agreements in any significant quantity prior to 2010 was simply untrue. In an ironic, but predictable, turn of fate, pushing written offers 11 months back in the process has actually created more confusion within the recruiting process because it has made verbal offers more prevalent.

Imagine being a PSA going on one of your first recruiting trips. An FBS program has invited you to their junior day, and while there one of the assistant coaches tells you, “We want you to be a part of this University.” Now, to many PSAs, especially those brand new to the process, that sounds like a scholarship offer. But is it? Maybe. Maybe not. And maybe the school wants you to be a little confused so they can claim it was or wasn’t a real offer later in the process, depending on how recruiting goes for them.

From the standpoint of a PSA, written offers hold more value. Having tangible proof of an offer makes college programs less likely to rescind that offer when they cannot claim it was never there in the first place. It also may be useful to affirm a PSA’s value to other programs, or the public at large.

One example of this comes from the 2009 class when fans, and even some media, questioned whether San Diego-based quarterback Tate Forcier really had as many offers as he claimed. In response, Forcier took pictures of every one of his written offers and posted them on his personal website. That page still exists and is a testament to the value of written offers compared to verbal offers.

As for slowing down the recruiting process, moving when prospects could receive written offers back 11 months was not even a speed bump. By the time coaches are allowed to extend written offers the majority of PSAs have already made their college selections. Today, verbal offers are the currency of the trade. Written offers are fast-becoming obsolete.

The topic of committable and uncommittable offers has become more pronounced in recent years, largely because of offers being extended earlier in a PSA’s high school career. When a scholarship is offered, the expectation is it can be accepted and the PSA can make a commitment to that program. However, in college football recruiting that is not always the case.

A question I would expect in response to this is, why do coaches not wait to offer until they are ready to accept a PSA’s commitment? The reason is they would be late to the game with most prospects.

These are placeholder offers. It gives the impression that a school has been an active player for a PSA’s commitment for a longer period of time than they actually were. Most offers are not immediately acted upon with a commitment, so offering a PSA before you are ready to accept his commitment allows you to stay up with the competition, while the likelihood of an uncomfortable situation arising because they want to commit right away is low.

It is difficult for even the closest observers of the college football recruiting process to determine which offers are committable and which are not. For PSAs, the only way to know for sure whether their offer is committable is to ask, “can I commit right now?” Common answers from college coaches that indicate an offer is uncommittable at the time are, “Well, we want you to camp first,” or “We really want to develop a relationship with you and your family first.”

Can an offer go from uncommittable to committable? Definitely, and it happens all the time. Maybe a prospect is fifth on a team’s chart at a position where they can only take two prospects. Maybe they offer six, but only the top 2-3 can actually commit right away. When the top couple guys start committing elsewhere, though, now that PSA who was fifth on the team’s chart moves up into the magic range and his offer, whether he recognizes it or not, becomes committable.

FBS football programs are allowed to place 85 players on scholarship at any one time, with a maximum of 25 of those spots allowed for first-year players. Many college programs end up in a position from time to time when they need more bodies than that 25 number for first-year players allows. This has given rise to grayshirt offers and blueshirt offers.

A grayshirt is by far the most common of the two offers, and it is a way for programs to delay when a recruited prospect counts toward that initial 25 first-year player restriction. A prospect who is grayshirted does not go on scholarship until second semester of his freshman year, and counts against the class immediately after his for the first-year player restriction. For example, a prospect who graduates high school in 2019 will go on scholarship and join the team in January 2020, and count against the 2020 class.

A blueshirt is much more complex, and more rare, than a grayshirt, but the goals of the two are essentially the same. In order for a prospect to blueshirt with a school he must not have taken an official visit to that school, had an in-home visit with a coach from that school or sign a National Letter of Intent.

Now, a blueshirt can unofficially visit the school during his recruitment, the coaches can call him on the phone just like any other recruited prospect and they talk about recruiting the prospect. As long as no official visits or in-home coach visits have been conducted and no NLI signed, that player can still be blueshirted.

A blueshirted player can start with the team during fall camp of his freshman year as a walk-on, then go on scholarship after the first day of fall camp. If we take our PSA from the grayshirt example above and blueshirt him, he can start with the team in August of 2019, but does not count against the first-year player restriction until 2020.

At its core, an offer is a promise between a coach and PSA to award a scholarship to play football at the coach’s university. At the FBS level all football scholarships are full-ride, meaning they cover tuition and its related fees, room, board and books. Non-head count sports at the Division I level and lower level football schools, like Division II, can offer partial scholarships, which may cover just tuition or just room and board.

Another important point to note here is that in most cases, scholarships are good for just one academic year. Many fans and even PSAs assume when a Letter of Intent is signed it is good for the full four years, but the standard is annually-renewable scholarships. The NCAA actually used to forbid multi-year scholarships, but that ban was rescinded for Division I in 2012 and some programs do offer multi-year scholarships now.

While I have not heard of an offer via carrier pigeon, pretty much every other means of communication has been used to extend scholarship offers. However, the offer, as mentioned earlier, is only as valuable as the word of the coach extending it. And, in many cases, it comes with certain conditions.

Commit too late or too soon? The offer is not valid. Don’t play up to expectations? The offer is not valid. Change of coaches, scheme, personnel? The recruiting world is an ever-changing landscape and a PSA’s ability to accurately interpret that picture will determine how effectively he will execute his recruitment.