With early signing day for college football recruiting just a week away, it’s time to take a look at the top uncommitted prospects and project where they might end up.
The end of the college football regular season is always a somber time as we await the beginning of bowl season, but the recent rule change to allow for an early signing period has cranked up recruiting for this time of the year, which gives us diehards something to focus on while we wait for the action on the field to return.
The birth of the early signing period has effectively given us two recruiting seasons with coaches scrambling in December to get everyone who is committed signed on December 19. If the early signing period passes and guys who are committed to your program don’t sign on the dotted line, then they should be considered soft-verbals at best, and the sharks will be in the water looking to flip them during the two months between now and National Signing Day in February.
With more and more freshmen and sophomores making big impacts across college football, more recruits than ever are looking to sign in December so as to enroll in school early and go through bowl practices and spring training with their school of choice, giving them a leg up on the other players in their recruiting class who don’t enroll until the summer.
The early signing period debuted last year, and it took some getting used to as some coaches, including master recruiter Nick Saban, got blindsided a bit and misinterpreted how many recruits would be willing to sign early. That left Saban and the Crimson Tide scrambling in February, and saw them drop all the way down to 5th in the recruiting rankings, which was the first time in seven years Alabama didn’t finish with the No. 1 class.
Saban has since corrected that, and currently has the Tide sitting back atop its perch in the 247Sports composite rankings, with the opportunity for a big finish that could lift the 2019 class to the best one in the history of the internet recruiting era.
While several highly sought after prospects are slated to sign in the early period, plenty more are projected to wait until February as they mull their decisions a little bit longer.
According to 247Sports, there are 10 5-star prospects who are still uncommitted, four of which plan to sign on the 19th. Let’s take a look at those 10 prospects, and make predictions on where they will play their college football in 2019.