Did You Sign or Get Over-Signed?
May 28th, 2010 - byA fantastic new website came our way today that is dedicated to the investigation and stories behind the practice of oversigning athletes in college sports. What is oversigning? I’ll leave it up to them to define the practice:
Oversigning – In its purest most ruthless form, oversigning is the practice of accepting letters of commitment from more players than you currently have room for in anticipation of attrition between national signing day in February and when the NCAA requires rosters to be at 85 in August.
There are varying degrees of oversigning, some not quite as bad as others. Regardless, we believe any time you sign more players than you have room for and you have to depend on either the player you signed to not be academically eligible or for a current player to be cut from a team in order to stay under the 85 scholarship limit and bring in the newly signed commitments that it hurts the kids involved and the sport as a whole.
Oversigning is not signing more than 25 players in a single recruiting class; it is going over the 85 scholarship limit. For example, if you have 65 player returning on scholarship and you sign 23, you have oversigned by 3 because 65+23 = 88. Therefore, even though you didn’t go over 25 in a single class, you have oversigned.
Simply put, it is our opinion that there is no place for oversigning in College Football.
I highly recommend you check out Oversigning.com and learn about this practice that leaves signed, sealed and almost delivered scholarship athletes out in the cold.
I also would like to point out that there are several steps an athlete can take to make sure they aren’t among the casualties. The NCSA curriculum teaches student-athletes how to walk the fine line between getting the last scholarship offer that is truly available and receiving a scholarship that is contingent upon the school not snagging the commitment of one more blue-chipper. In essence the ability to make sure that your spot on the roster is secure. Its just one more advantage of real recruiting education.
