The SEC has seen drastic head coaching turnover this season, headlined by Lane Kiffin’s sport-altering decision to depart from Ole Miss in favor of LSU. According to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, Kiffin’s move highlighted one major problem in the sport that he would like to see fixed.
After Kiffin announced his intention to leave for Baton Rouge, the remaining dominoes around the conference quickly fell.
Unfortunately, these drastic changes around the conference also had drastic ramifications on the three-day early national signing day period for high school recruits, which began on Wednesday.
All of the sudden coaching changes just days before early national signing day led to many top SEC recruits having to make tough decisions to either stay with programs bringing in a new coach, or potentially flip their commitment and look elsewhere.
Had Kiffin made his decision to leave for LSU earlier, other coaching searches may have concluded faster. In turn, recruits committed to the six SEC programs that have named a new head coach in the past week would have had considerably more time to make a decision on whether to sign or not.
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Greg Sankey laid out this exact argument during an appearance on “The Paul Finebaum Show” on Friday, asking for the national signing day to be moved back on the calendar to avoid this situation in the future.
“It’s Lane. That kind of lingered for a long time, so it became big news consistently,” said Sankey. “But it’s happened. This one, though, because of the season that Ole Miss had, was obviously drawing more interest and a lot of questions. Why is the timing the way it is? Remember when Nick [Saban] was hired at Alabama years ago, that was not until the Monday of the national championship game. So it hasn’t always been this way.
“What are the big factors? One of the big factors is we moved up Signing Day into December. So you have to have a coach in place, right? Well, let’s change the signing date. That would be the one big step to say, let’s just go back to February and take some of that pressure off. And then, how can we move the transfer portal? Those are things that we control. And we ought to control those.”
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Sankey certainly isn’t alone in his criticism of the current recruiting schedule within the sport. Lane Kiffin himself raised concerns about the college football calendar during his introductory press conference with LSU.
There would undoubtedly need to be logistics to be worked out if the NCAA decided to take Sankey’s advice of moving the initial signing day period back. As the SEC commissioner alluded to, one question that arises in that scenario is where the transfer portal window would fit into a schedule with a later first signing day period.
Regardless, it certainly seems like both teams and high school recruits would benefit greatly from a later initial signing day period once coaches are fully in place across the country heading into the following year.
For more on the NCAA, head to Newsweek Sports.
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