College Football: Winners and Losers from opening of early signing period

College Football’s early signing period opened on Wednesday, leaving several teams feeling like winners and several feeling like losers.

The early signing period has usurped the National Signing Day in February as THE signing day, with the vast majority of recruits choosing to put pen to paper in December rather than waiting two more months until February to make their choice of school official.

This was unexpected last year and left some big-named coaches befuddled; it caught nobody off guard this year, though. Coaches were more prepared and moved quickly to fill out their classes, leaving only a handful of highly regarded prospects who will wait to decide their fates until the traditional signing day in February.

The early signing period brings a unique set of challenges, particularly for the coaches who have to focus on conference championship preparations along with bowl preparations (particularly for the four coaches whose teams are in the College Football Playoff), which leads to less time on the recruiting trail.

These last couple of weeks have seen most coaches getting by on coffee, energy drinks, and few winks of sleep; there just hasn’t been any time to devote to such anthropomorphic behaviors.

For some, the lack of sleep and family time paid off as several programs are popping champagne and finally catching their breath a little bit as they admire strong recruiting hauls littered with blue-chip prospects ready to make immediate impacts.

For others, the work is just beginning as they swung and missed during the early signing period, leaving them to scramble over the next month and a half to pick up the pieces and put together their 2019 recruiting classes.

There’s still work to be done even in the early signing period for some, with the period extending until the 22nd and a few notable holdouts who coaches will hope to sway into signing to prevent the sharks from circling around their prized recruits over the next seven weeks.

For the most part, though, the work has been done for the early signing period, giving us an accurate gauge of who should be celebrating, and who is left to reevaluate things as they try and figure out what went wrong.

Here are some winners and losers from the early signing period: