Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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MURPHY'S LAW DAN MURPHY a full bore recruiting effort during the most important time of the regular season. "I don't want to turn the regular sea- son into such a recruiting frenzy that you can't even coach your team on a weekly basis," Georgia head coach Mark Richt told reporters. "I enjoy coaching football, too." Richt was one of a handful of coaches that spoke up in protest when an NCAA official insinuated an early signing date was more a mat- ter of when, not if. Stanford's David Shaw, Kentucky's Mark Stoops and Louisville's Bobby Petrino all raised legitimate concerns. Getting any two coaches on the same page is difficult; making all 124 of them happy is im- possible. The same pattern has unfolded many times in debates about the fu- ture of college football. A year ago the NCAA attempted to update its anti- quated contact rules for 21st century communication. They temporarily lifted a ban on texting recruits and changed the types of mail schools could send to prospects. The flood of negative feedback sent them back to the drawing board. The "10-second" rule — a proposal to give defenses time to adjust to the new speed of hurry-up offenses — was shot down with equal vigor in March. These setbacks add to the NCAA's reputation as an out-of-touch organi- zation struggling to keeps its lucra- tive stranglehold of power on college sports. The problem is these setbacks aren't a problem. This is the glacial pace of a large group of people with mixed interests attempting to govern themselves. In the same way that the gears of the federal government slowly grind problems to dust until the right an- swer seems so obvious it's foolish, the debate between the NCAA rules com- mittee or the CCA and college coaches is set up to make sure hasty decisions aren't tripped up by unturned stones. An early signing period would have been a disaster five years ago. There are still important issues to resolve. How does this change the rest of the recruiting calendar rules, like official visits? Will too early a date increase the number of kids who try to back out of signed contracts a la Eddie Vander- does, the California defensive tackle who signed with Notre Dame in 2013 and then decided to attend UCLA? Is this pushing a sequence of events that already has college coaches watching high school football film a few months earlier? It does appear that an early signing day is coming. And for the growing majority of recruits that know what they want before they start their se- nior year of high school, it will be a welcome relief. It's also a victory for the majority of coaches who can spend less time guarding their henhouse of verbal commits in the final push to- ward National Signing Day. It's prog- ress — painfully slow, smart, beautiful progress. ✦ Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached at dmurphy@blueandgold.com