This is some major news that broke late Wednesday. The decision to extend the recruiting dead period to April 15 is expected to be finalized next week.
As Dennis Dodd of CBSSports mentions, it will mean that college coaches will be away from recruits for more than a year.
This football coach from Texas below sums it up well. Click on the link in the tweet to read Dodd’s story.
This is absolutely ridiculous. You are asking players to make life altering decisions blindly. Every time I go to Walmart or Home Depot, the place is full. Very bad decision in my opinion! https://t.co/5UxYIhedD7
— Michael Boone (@michaelboone44) November 12, 2020
Penn State running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider has been a successful recruiter in Florida and had this to say Thursday about the extension of the dead period.
“It’s tough,” he said. “It makes you be creative, it makes the whole recruiting department come up with different ideas because you can’t you can’t use it as an excuse because everybody’s doing it. So you have to be creative in what you’re doing and not get stale, not get bored.
“It sucks because I’m an in-person guy, I like to see guys practice. If I put my name on a kid, I see him. I want to see that adversity that kid goes through at practice and in the game, how he responds. Because highlight tapes are highlights. You can see a lot of great highlight tapes when kids make plays. But I want to see when the game’s tough or the practice is tough, does he rise to the occasion, or does he take a back seat. Because when a kid takes a back seat, it’s gonna happen on a big stage when we got to play Ohio State, we got to play Michigan in front of a hundred-something thousand at home or away.
“So to me, I’m a big believer in you got to get in front of these kids and see them. You got to get into school, you got to know the people that know the kid and get information from the guidance counselor, from the teachers, from whoever, the decision makers. So that’s been tough, that’s been challenging, especially for guys like us. You don’t want to miss in a class because you only get so many numbers, especially this year with a smaller class. … We got to be diligent in our research and watching as much film and these kids working out, as much as they can show us.”
