WVU's Rich Rodriguez wants calendar change regarding National Signing Day

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Dec. 9—MORGANTOWN — The college football calendar has issues, especially towards the end of the season. This year, it was on full display.

After Ole Miss's last game of the season, beating Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl, the Rebels punched their ticket to the College Football Playoff, with an 11-1 record, and their lone loss being against Georgia. Just two days later, the Rebels' head coach, Lane Kiffin, accepted the head coaching position at LSU, leaving his playoff-bound team coachless.

This was the case throughout the sport, where lower-level schools, like James Madison and Tulane, who punched their ticket into the playoffs, were being poached by bigger schools. But those schools allowed their head coaches to coach through the playoffs.

But the calendar puts the schools, like LSU, in a position where they need to make that decision and fill their vacant head coaching position immediately. Why ? Because at the start of December, four days after the final regular season games, is the early period for National Signing Day.

The National Signing Day period actually moved up, too, and now it's in the mix of coaching searches and comes when bigger schools are preparing for conference championship games.

Luckily, based on the point of view, West Virginia's not in a bowl game or playing for a conference championship, so Rich Rodriguez and his staff can fully commit to high school recruiting. WVU hit recruiting hard, too, signing over 40 players.

"If we were doing what we're supposed to do, we'd be playing in a bowl game or a championship game ; it would make it a heck of a lot crazier, " Rodriguez said. "For us, we've had nothing else to do but recruit in the last four days, right ?"

It's probably one of the only bright sides to not playing in the postseason. Obviously, you'd want to be preparing for a game and can figure out recruiting along the way, but after a 4-8 season, that's not the case for WVU.

"If I was playing for a conference championship game, which I was doing last year, and somebody else was off recruiting, we were playing a game, you lose a little bit of time, " Rodriguez said. "But you're playing for a championship game. That's a pretty good deal. I'm happy I'm in the game. I'd rather be in the game this week than just recruiting."

Recruiting obviously doesn't happen in the days leading up to National Signing Day. Most of the recruits are committed in the summer and months before, and National Signing Day is just making it official.

But the final pushes, like WVU made for 4-star Matt Sieg, happen in the last 24-48 hours.

"If you didn't recruit every day since the last signing day, then you're behind anyway, " Rodriguez. "Every day you recruit. You recruit every day. Maybe you do other things on top of that, and your recruiting staff just does recruiting, and as a position coach, you do a little bit of recruiting, and a little bit of coaching."

The early National Signing Day still creates issues. Penn State hired Matt Campbell a few days after he signed 22 high schoolers to play for him at Iowa State. Now, those signees aren't going to play for the coach they signed up for.

Rodriguez agrees it's a broken system. He's been vocal about how college football needs to change. Rodriguez doesn't like the calendar and was a big advocate for the singular transfer portal window. He also wants an NIL cap.

Rodriguez again talked about how he wants college football to adopt an NFL style. But the issue with the date of the early National Signing Day, it's hard to find a fix, since most of these players, who sign early, usually enroll early and are on campus in the spring.

It's easy to complain, but harder to find a solution.

"There's no easy answer to it, " Rodriguez said. "Coaches are planning to move the calendar or whatever. I think the whole thing should look like the NFL model. I said this forever. Why does college football, college athletics, college football in general, not look at the NFL timeline ? Model how they do everything and try to adopt ours as close to that as possible. They've done it for years, and they're pretty successful at it. Yet, for some reason, the colleges have a whole different framework with their timeline and all that kind of stuff. I think in that regard, in totality, but no matter what you're going to do, it's not a great time."

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