Tag: JUCO football

The Changing Landscape of Football Recruiting at Junior Colleges

JUCOs in focus

College recruiting has always been a changing landscape. As technology and coverage have changed, recruiting has improved throughout its evolution, as has the way college recruiters get in contact with recruits and their parents. It’s a way for the colleges to improve their communication in an effort to land highest-ranked recruits in the nation at a time in which recruits are more essential to a program’s future than ever before. 

In our previous column on Trojans Wire, we explored the recruiting landscape at the high school level. Now it’s time to focus on the junior college recruitment process. As was mentioned in the column linked in the previous sentence above, JUCOs have expressed the desire to switch to spring football. How they are going to actually pull that off remains the biggest question of all. While it’s not exactly wise, high school kids are young enough and able enough to potentially play a fall schedule after playing in spring. At the FBS collegiate level, however, that becomes infinity more difficult.   

Kyle Murphy played on the offensive line at Arizona State from 1993-1997. In his opinion, the rigors of the game would prevent people from really being able to give their all to what would amount to two seasons in one year. It also doesn’t account for the injury recovery time window that typically accompanies a fall schedule. Someone injured badly in the spring is now going to have a completely different recovery timetable. 

“The demands required on the body to play collegiate football are extreme,” Murphy said. “Thus, athletes need time to recover from their previous season and prepare their bodies for the upcoming season. Playing in the spring and fall doesn’t afford those athletes that opportunity. They will be more prone to being hurt and/or being injured. What about athletes injured in the spring? Some won’t have the time to properly heal. Player safety is constantly and consistently touted as the most important aspect of the decision making process but I don’t understand how playing in the spring AND fall accomplishes that.”

Of course, none of this accounts for how coaches will evaluate talent at the JUCO level. Are they going to use tape from high school and their collegiate career? Are they going to rely solely on tape? Will they be going to watch these athletes during their own hectic spring schedule? What if colleges do end up playing in the fall? Will they also have to crank up the recruiting right before National Signing Day while using only film? There are so many questions left to be asked. One thing we know for certain is that nothing is certain right now. Whatever ends up happening is surely going to change the way we process the game for good. 

The COVID-19 Landscape of Football Recruiting

Complicated questions

College recruiting has always been a changing landscape. As technology and coverage has changed, it has improved over time, as has the way college recruits get in contact with recruits and their parents. It’s a way for the colleges to improve their communication in an effort to land highest-ranked recruits in the nation at a time when recruits are more essential to a program than ever before. 

Whether public schools open this fall — including, for emphasis in this piece, high schools with college prospects — seems to be an ongoing battle between Donald Trump and the various superintendents of different school districts. Several superintendents have said they do not plan to open this fall. Los Angeles Public Schools will not open this fall, instead opting to maintain their online correspondence courses this fall… and that’s just one district in the country. San Diego opted to do the same.

It’s a touch and go situation, and it seems very “go” right now as opposed to “touch.” It’s not an easy situation to deal and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. What works for one district may not work for another. 

This makes it really hard for college coaches to evaluate high school football players. Lack of competition or limited competition — either one — put coaches in a bind. Plenty of coaches won’t have the full set of evaluation-based tools they usually depend on. They’re going to offer a number of kids based on film and film alone. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising if a number of kids in this class turn out to be busts. Coaches are going to have to spend a good chunk of their time developing these players instead of relying on sheer talent. 

Of course, it won’t just be high school players who are offered scholarships. Junior colleges around the nation have already announced that they will be playing their games in the spring instead of the fall. This gives coaches and players time and space to avoid coronavirus infections, providing them the ability to practice and get into shape prior to engaging in a full season of play. Something that gets lost in these discussions is that players need that time to get into football shape. You can’t just slap a season together and expect folks to be ready to go simply because administrators will it to be so. We will be exploring the JUCO recruiting puzzle — and its specific challenges — in another article.

Report: JUCO football to move to a spring season

The National Junior College Athletic Association is expected to make the announcement on Monday.

There will be no JUCO football this fall.

On Sunday, The Athletic reported that the National Junior College Athletic Association is expected announce on Monday that the football season will take place in the fall.

From Max Olson:

“Teams would play up to eight games with preseason practices beginning on March 1 and the regular season beginning at the end of March and extending through the end of May.

NJCAA president and CEO Dr. Christopher Parker and the NJCAA’s presidential advisory council announced their recommendation to move the majority of its sports to spring seasons on Thursday. The NJCAA board of regents will meet Monday to determine the official plan. Parker confirmed to The Athletic that an eight-game spring football schedule is “the direction it would be heading in.”

“We would like to play football this fall,” Parker said. “But I think from a national perspective, moving it is probably the right decision holistically.”

Just this week, the Big Ten and Pac-12 announced that they will play conference-only schedules while the Ivy League has cancelled all sporting events through January 1.

This will make a huge impact in recruiting for FBS teams as schools constantly sign players from JUCO schools. Coaches will now not have a chance to further evaluate players on the field, something that has already been limited due to the dead period caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Many mid-year prospects have already been evaluated and offered and committed before the fall season based on their freshman season,” Hughes said. “What it changes is those mid-year December graduates who are evaluated on the fall season performance and who are not no-brainers going into the fall season but develop into a FBS players during the fall, are signed in December, are able to come into an FBS program in January and contribute or start or provide depth right away going into spring ball.”

JUCO football moves to spring of 2021, part of seismic change

More big changes

The earth keeps shifting under our feet in the world of scholastic football. The state of Texas is unsure if it can play football this fall, which is a deafening statement about the seriousness of COVID-19. Now comes this news from the junior college ranks:

I’m not going to offer an opinion on whether this dooms college football for the fall. I am merely going to keep repeating the biggest point we all need to absorb and process: We’re not living in a normal situation. Any people still clinging to the idea that we will have a normal college football game experience, and everything that involves, need to let go of that.

Maybe we will still have games to play and watch this fall, but if we do, they aren’t going to be the normal games we are used to loving, and shouting about, and getting worked up about. If we do have football, it will be very different.

What this JUCO story means is that recruiting will be profoundly chaotic and disorganized in the near future. We shouldn’t even assume that spring football will be played; this plan by the National Junior College Athletic Association, much like the Big Ten and Pac-12 plans to have conference-only schedules, are attempted adjustments.

Emphasize the word “attempted.”

This hardly guarantees the Big Ten and Pac-12 will, in fact, play football this fall. The conferences are merely trying to give themselves better odds of playing football, even as the terrible COVID-19 news sweeps across the country. The virus — as we have told you from the start — is driving the bus. College football is on the bus. If the virus gets worse, college football will get off the bus. If the virus stabilizes, college football can remain on the bus and arrive safely at its destination (a fall season with 10 games played and TV money recouped, staving off added layers of financial disaster).

It’s the same with the JUCO spring football plan: It is just that — a plan. It doesn’t offer any guarantee of actually playing. It is merely the NJCAA’s best attempt to get some games played and give JUCO athletes a meaningful experience, so that they can show the big colleges what they are made of.

We will have much more to say about spring football if fall football is canceled. We haven’t arrived at that point yet, so there’s no reason to address the subject now. We will cross that bridge when we get to it. Yet, the mere possibility of spring football invites important questions about the ability of recruits to play in the spring and the autumn of the same calendar year. That topic will have to be examined in great detail as we consider the large-scale effects on recruiting in the Power Five conferences and the entire FBS.

As with everything else in the world of COVID-19, stay tuned for new developments.