The Division I Council approved changes to the recruiting calendar on Thursday, hoping to cater to more of a work-life balance for football coaches across all divisions.
The new rules were proposed by the Oversight Committee in early April and will now go into effect for FBS teams on Aug. 1. Among the larger changes in guidelines include creating a contact period from April 15 to May 29 that will consist of 140 total recruiting days for a program’s coaching staff.
The current rule accounts for 168 days from April 15 to May 31, so the new rules reduces the number of allowable recruiting days by 28. It also changes the current evaluation period to a contact period, which would allow coaches to have in-person contact with recruits they are evaluating.
The Council is also reducing the number of evaluation days in September, October and November by nine recruiting days from 42 to 33. The rule states that only authorized off-campus recruiters can visit a prospective student-athlete’s school and on only one calendar day during this period.
The Council wanted to standardize the procedures for coaches making telephone calls, texts and sending recruiting materials to prospects. All activities will now be allowed on June 15 at the conclusion of a prospect’s sophomore year of high school. The Council is, however, eliminating the restrictions on the number of phone calls a program can make once they are able to contact recruits.
The previous rule did not allow coaches to contact recruits over the phone until Sep. 1 of their junior year.
Coaches will legally be allowed to have off-campus in-person contact with recruits after Jan. 1 of the prospects junior year in high school. That essentially gives coaches the opportunity to go to a recruit’s high school and have contact with them nearly 11 months prior to when they are currently allowed. It limits the contact only to the recruit’s school, however, and does not include in-home visits.
The current rule states that coaches can’t have contact with junior prospects until July 1, following the completion of the recruit’s junior year of high school. But the way the calendar is made up, there is a dead period starting in July running through August, then an evaluation period, which does not allow contact with recruits, from September through Nov. 27.
As it stands now, coaches weren’t able to have contact with juniors until the contact period opened in December, even though the rule stated they should be able to in July. That discrepancy was part of the clean-up with the new rule.
The new rules also state that schools would be allowed up to two off-campus contacts with an individual prospect during the January contact period of the recruit’s junior year and one off-campus contact during the spring contact period. That lowers the number of contacts from two to one in the spring duration.
In addition, the Council is changing the dead period after the February signing period to go from Jan. 30 to Feb. 28 of this current year, changing it to the first Monday of the signing day week to the first Sunday in March. All of these changes were implemented in hopes to modernize the recruiting calendar and adapt to the ongoing changes that coaches and recruits are experiencing in the current recruiting landscape.