The Junkyard

The SEC 25 scholarship per signing period makes possible non-qualifiers a risk that may follow a program for several years. If a SEC school accepts a LOI for a prospect who does not qualify there are two things that can happen:

1) That prospect can become eligable by the next early signing period and count back to his original spot, no harm done.

2) That prospect does not become eligable by the next early signing period and their original spot is wasted, reducing the number that can count back by one. If that prospect never enrolls the spot still counts. If he does enroll then he counts for both years. The end result is the same, a wasted spot in the original year.

The wasted spot might not be the limiting factor for the school if it reaches the NCAA max of 85 total scholarships first but there is a ripple effect. There is one less open spot available for an early enrollee to take the next year. The non-qualifiers wasted spot will continue to limit the school year to year. There are two ways for the wasted spot to become irrelevant:

1) The wasted spot costs the school a player that they thought could help the school win and wanted to take.

2) The school doesn't have more early enrollees to count back than it has spots open from the previous year (which has a ripple effect of its own).

An example is Floyd. He didn't qualify for 2012 and could not enroll early. He is part of the 2013 class but he counts against both 2012 and 2013. We had more early enrollees than open spots. That means that one of our 2013 early enrollees will count against 2013 that could have been counted back to the spot that Floyd wasted. That means that there will be one less 2013 spot for a 2014 early enrollee to take.

If we take 33 in this class our max class size for 2014 will be 27 where it could have been a 28 max. If attrition is low it won't matter in 2014 because we'll hit 85 total before we hit 27 for the year but if we have 3 early enrollees that wasted spot will follow us to 2015 ....

With recruiting pushing earlier there are more early enrollees and the chances are that a non-qualifier will eventually have a price. Not finding enough early enrollees that can contribute has a price of its own too.

The whole point is that when someone does not qualify (for whatever reason, not just acedemic) it is a big deal now. When our staff does not offer someone with an issue we should be so quick to be critical.

The right thing to do is to continue to recruit someone who may have an issue but not to take the LOI. A school could hold a spot if they weren't crazy about anyone else that year, the prosect was worth it, and he would take the school's word they were holding the spot.

IMO, they only way that it makes sense to accept on LOI from a guy who may be a non-qualifier is if he won't consider schools who won't take it on signing day AND he is good enough to change the program (not just contribute). I think you'll see smaller programs taking these risks more often for that reason.

Thoughts?