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26 May 2010
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - The conference meetings going on across the country are more about brainstorming ideas than implementing them and discussing problems instead of fixing them.
Still, I remain hopeful Athletic Director Ed Pastilong returns to West Virginia University's campus Wednesday with an agreed-upon explanation for exactly what happened on "Lost."
One thing Pastilong and the rest of his Big East brethren will discuss this week is the concept of an early signing period for football. I say this because the Big Ten had pushed the topic and that league seems to be - or believes to be - the first domino in all college athletic initiatives.
The ACC and Conference USA are also in favor of a change and for the obvious reasons. A window in, say, early December at the end of the regular season, in addition to the one that begins the first Wednesday in February reduces the length of the recruiting process, the pressure on kids, the demand on college coaches and the expenses for colleges.
The justification doesn't make as much sense. College basketball has a week-long early signing period in November before a longer period that bridges April and March. Apparently the concept has gained momentum the past five years after the NBA stopped accepting high school players and required college players to do a year on campus. That thinking suggests the players good enough to go to the NBA who instead must go to college sign early and move on to shopping for endorsement deals.
Fair enough, but more often than not those players prove good enough to make the jump after one season, but are then joined by others who feel they can leave early, too. That leaves teams in April with a roster that looks different than what it was projected to look like in November, when the next class signed early.
A lot changes during and after a college basketball season and that impacts recruiting. You need not look beyond WVU. When guard Noah Cottrill and center David Nyarsuk signed their national letters of intent in November, they claimed the team's two open scholarships. Then May 5 - two weeks before the end of the late signing period - Devin Ebanks formally announced he was leaving the team shortly before Jonnie West did the same. Suddenly there were two more scholarships available.
Think there are two players out there somewhere who are wondering if they might have been interested in stepping onto a Final Four team in May rather than some other team in November?
