Trying to pick up the pieces from his team’s 41-10 shellacking last week at Texas A&M, Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz found out pretty much the same time as everyone else Wednesday morning that the NCAA intended to move forward with yet another significant change pertaining to the recruiting process across all sports: No more National Letter of Intent.
The NCAA formally clarified its position Wednesday afternoon:
“The council also adopted changes to NCAA signing rules that transition the National Letter of Intent program protections into signing and recruiting rules, effective immediately. The change was made at the recommendation of the Conference Commissioners Association, which previously had administrative oversight of the NLI program.
“Moving forward, written offers of athletics aid will replace the NLI, and the previous formula for determining signing dates will be applied to those written offers. Transfer prospects may be signed by a new school once their names are permissibly entered in the Transfer Portal. After a prospect signs a written offer of athletics aid, other schools that offer athletically related financial aid will be prohibited from recruiting communications with that prospect.”
Drinkwitz didn’t say if he thinks that move is good or bad but he expressed frustration with the timing of the decision.
“Honestly I’ve got a lotta thoughts on it, but we’re in middle of a season and I need to make sure my focus on trying to figure out a way to beat UMass,” he said.
“It’s really hard for head coaches right now to get their focused and motivated to play on Saturdays while constantly figuring out what new changes are coming down. I mean, today, this morning, I just got word that we no longer have National Letters of Intent. We’re getting blown up by recruits and we don’t have any answers for them. We don’t have answers for the settlement, we don’t have answers for NLI, we don’t have answers for National Letter of Intent; we don’t have a lot of answers right now on the Portal.
“So, constant change and yet we’re still trying to do the very best we can to focus on our team and win football games. It’s a challenging environment right now. But, it is what it is.”
The NCAA also is modifying its windows for the NCAA Transfer Portal, whittling it down further from 45 days to just 30. The first window under the new guidelines opens for 20 days in December and the final 10 will open in April 2025.
Has roster management replaced game planning and preparing a team as the toughest element of a head coach’s job in this climate?
“Well the answer to that question is, do you even know what roster is going to be in future? Because I don’t,” Drinkwitz said. “The settlement won’t be finalized until April. The settlement has roster limits, which limits the number of scholarships you can have. Or, not limit; it actually doesn’t limit scholarships but it limits the number on roster you can have.
“But, we don’t know what any of that looks like moving forward. So, yeah, trying to build a team when you don’t know what the rules of that will look like is pretty difficult.”