SEC chief pushes for change to college football recruiting schedule

With coaches and programs feeling intense pressure late in the season, the SEC wants college football to make some changes to put the heat off

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is lobbying for a major change to the current college football recruiting schedule amid calls to re-arrange dates on the calendar so they don't conflict with the start of the bowl season and the playoff.

Part of the change Sankey is interested in involves making the month of December itself into a recruiting dead period and moving the Early Signing Period up by two weeks nearer the start of the month, he told Yahoo Sports.

Those changes come from a consensus among SEC football coaches.

"Putting signing day in the middle of December with playoff games no longer works," Sankey said. "Move it to early December, the Wednesday before [conference] championship games."

December is a very active time for college football coaches and their already overworked assistant coaches and other recruiting staff members. 

That busy schedule also includes the open of the winter window of the transfer portal, seriously crowding out important time that teams need to prepare for the postseason.

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Then, there are often bombshell coaching changes at programs, where the entire administration of a football program is overhauled on the fly during that time.

This coming postseason also finds the College Football Playoff expanding from four to 12 teams, introducing yet more activity onto the December schedule, with first-round games to be played on campus this coming Dec. 20-21, at the time of the early signing period.

All of those forces — which grow more complicated amid the sport's NIL activity — have moved some notable assistants and even one head coach to abandon the sport altogether and leave for positions on NFL teams, a trend that could grow more pronounced in the future unless some kind of change is made.

A change that the SEC, and almost certainly other conferences, hope get a fair hearing to take some of the pressure off their coaches.

(Yahoo)

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