What Early Signing Day Mean To Buffalo

Every year it seems teams get some real surprises on national signing day. Some players are scurried away at the last minute by competing programs and the dominoes start to fall.

The Bulls have felt this pinch over the last few years, in fact most programs have. Not just mid majors but high flight elite programs have found out that their class got poached a few days before national signing day.

This season the NCAA has sought to somewhat mitigate the chaos by adding an early signing day. The signing period will last 72 hours, beginning Dec. 20 and running through Dec. 22.

Coaches are putting the expectation out there that their verbal commits will sign during this period.

One power five coach told SBNation that ““If you’re verbally committed, and you don’t sign, you’re not committed,””

A few others have decided to use the three day window to keep the margin players available. They will tell player A to wait 48 hours, in hopes that a better player they are waiting on commits first. Hedging their bets as it were.

What does this mean for Buffalo? First it means that if UB’s class gets poached in some way that the staff has an extra few weeks to back fill in for that spot.

Secondly it means that some players who UB was looking at who had verballed to, but didn’t sign with, another school could be “re-targeted” by Buffalo.

On a side not this is really going to hurt schools making coaching changes. Usually a new coach has more than a month to try and hold their class together, with this early signing day that window shrinks a lot.

And if you’re a school like Kent, which has still not hired a coach, it can destroy a recruiting class.