College Football Recruiting Turned Upside Down By Stoppage From COVID-19 Virus

The shutdown of sporting events is having a drastic impact on the future prospects of high school football players—and the coaches recruiting them.

Throughout the world of college football, things have been turned upside down, and perhaps no place is experiencing it more than in the world of recruiting.

It has been said many times before, but in the inexact science of recruiting, coaches and recruits are already tasked with building relationships and making decisions that will impact their situation in the future.  

For coaches, they must evaluate physical talent and decide if players are the right fit for their programs off the field while players are making similar decisions on a school's fit for them both athletically and academically.

Compound that now in the time of shelter in place under COVID-19, where players are not allowed to visit schools or sit and talk with coaches face to face. 

The same applies to coaches who can't sit with recruits and their families and build relationships and attempt to understand the backgrounds of the players they're recruiting. 

It's a tough task and one that will have some likely casualties in player transfers when all is said and done. College football coaches have adapted by using technology with recruits.     

The month of April typically kicks off what experts might consider the busiest evaluation period on the recruiting calendar. Stretching through most of June, this three-month term is chock full of significant events, many of them integral to the relationship-building portion of the recruiting process. It is a critical time in which coaches seriously begin scouting rising juniors while making final decisions on rising seniors; players for the first time tour campuses and work out in front of recruiters and schools distribute thousands of scholarship offers.

All of the above is rooted in something so rudimentary but currently absent: in-person interaction. The shutdown has now relegated all communication to FaceTime, Zoom, and text. At the start of the outbreak last month, the NCAA created a recruiting dead period through May forbidding in-person contact between coaches and prospects—on or off-campus. One Power 5 athletic director told Sports Illustrated earlier this week that the NCAA may extend the dead period through August, and already several schools have canceled prospect camps scheduled for June.

For Vanderbilt, head coach Derek Mason and his staff are now forced into these situations and, like everyone else, are making the best of a bad situation. 

Perhaps there's a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel with talk of beginning to "reopen the country" May 1, which would not necessarily mean for college football coaches. Still, it's a beginning, and to be able to begin to have an idea of when things might return to normal, or close to it would be a benefit to all involved in recruiting.   

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