Talent concentration at the top of college football is more extreme than it has been at any time in recent memory. Nine of the 12 highest-rated recruiting classes in college football history have been signed since 2017, eight of those nine coming from Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State. Teams are spending more money than ever on recruiting staffers and organization around the pursuit of talent as a whole, but even the programs most skilled in this effort continue to make a simple mistake at the sport’s most important position:
They keep taking commitments from quarterbacks more than year out from their National Signing Day.
I combed through 43 different recruiting classes – an amalgamation of the last ten classes (2014-2023) apiece at Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State, the Kirby Smart era at Georgia (2017-2023 classes), and the Lincoln Riley era at Oklahoma (2016-2021) – to look for any patterns in quarterback recruiting successes and failures. I selected these programs for what I think are fairly obvious reasons, but these are essentially the programs that brought in the most quarterback talent (and recruiting talent overall) while minimizing head coach turnover and regime change.
The goal of selecting these programs in these years is to find out what happens when a top-level program, one that generally has options at the position, chooses to take a commitment from a quarterback very early in the process, more than a year out from that prospect’s intended National Signing Day. I wanted to filter out the kind of decommitments that happen from coaching changes or program instability and hone in on the best recruiting programs, how they approach the quarterback position, and what fruit their approaches bear.
Those 43 recruiting classes featured a total of 58 commitments taken between them. 12 of those 58 cases are still unresolved, all of them due to compete in quarterback competitions this offseason at Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, and Ohio State. Of the other 46 commitments taken, 28 were players who committed to the school within a year of their signing day and 18 a year or further out from that mark. This does not include transfer recruiting.
To define the “early” group a bit further, and for clarity’s sake, I used the first Tuesday in February date for the recruiting classes of 2014-2018 and swapped to the December date for the 2019 class, the first group that had more than half of its FBS signees sign their Letters of Intent in the early signing period. These dates vary slightly by year, but not too much.
The 28 players who committed within a year produced a fairly successful hit rate: over 32-percent of the group, or nine players, went on to become successful starters. That group includes Heisman winners Bryce Young and Caleb Williams, standouts like C.J. Stroud and Jalen Hurts, and national title winners Tua Tagovailoa and Mac Jones, among others. Just four of the 28 players flipped away from the program prior to signing and 11 went on to start multiple games. If you’d like to be generous and count someone like D.J. Uiagalelei as a “hit”, the number jumps a bit further. I probably wouldn’t, and didn’t, but that depends on your definition of success.
Contrarily, the 18 players who committed further than a year out produced just three success stories, a hit rate of 16.7-percent. Two of them are all-time greats and national title winners at Clemson, the Tigers’ Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence, and the third is the admittedly controversial Spencer Rattler of Oklahoma (and now South Carolina). If you would consider Rattler’s tenure at Oklahoma to be a miss (I did, for the record), that number drops to 11.1-percent. Eight of those 18 players flipped before ever signing with their program and eight others transferred at some point in their career after signing. A quarterback who commits to your school more than a year out from his signing day is more than twice as likely to flip before signing than he is to ever start a game for you.
Even incredibly talented quarterbacks landed early by these programs – names like Drake Maye (flipped away from Alabama) or Quinn Ewers (transferred out of Ohio State) – didn’t ultimately yield fruit because of the uncertainty of taking a commitment so early. The way roster or coaching staff composition can change or even the needs and circumstances for a school can leave the program holding the bag. When a top end prospect flips away from your school or transfers out early in their career because of unexpected roster makeup, you’re frequently significantly more unprepared or further behind in your quarterback recruiting pursuits for backup options than you otherwise would have been.
That other group – those who we don’t know enough about to make a determination in their careers – should have a lot more clarity this time next year. Alabama has an open competition between four quarterbacks it signed in the last three classes, none of whom were early commitments. Likewise for Georgia and its three players in contention, all of whom were taken within a year of their signing date. Ohio State has a battle between Kyle McCord (a player they prioritized and turned down another five-star to get almost 20 months before he signed) and two December flips in Devin Brown and Lincoln Keinholz. Clemson has a late get, Cade Klubnik, expected to take the job unless Christopher Vizzina (also a spring get) generates a shocking upset. Even if McCord is a hit, the overwhelming likelihood says that these results widen the lead a bit for the late gets.
So why do some schools keep rushing to take quarterbacks so early if it’s largely a bad process that hurts them more than it helps them? I don’t think we’ll ever have a perfectly clear answer on this, but there are a handful of obvious contributing factors.
First and foremost is that schools are going to take commitments from elite players nearly any time they can get them, even if it’s difficult to hang on to the ride the entire way. They’d rather have the bird in the hand now instead of researching more about the other hundred birds in the bush. If you pass on a quarterback because you think he’s not quite good enough, who’s to say you end up reeling in one better the deeper into the process you get?
Second, there’s often a time-sensitive crunch to secure your seat in the game of quarterback musical chairs. We’re sitting here in late February, nearly ten months until most of these players will sign a Letter of Intent, and 12 of the top 25 quarterbacks per the 247Sports Composite rankings are already committed, including three of the top five.
Despite (hopefully) knowing these numbers, schools are still being risky and taking these early commitments. Alabama and Georgia have Julian Sayin and Ryan Puglisi, respectively, committed in the 2024 class and took them nearly 60 weeks before their targeted signing dates. Ohio State took a commitment from five-star Dylan Raiola in the same class in May 2022 and lost him just seven months later; in doing so, they spurned five-star Jadyn Davis, who is now favored to land with rival Michigan. Sayin and Puglisi are both expected to take visits after those two schools lost their offensive coordinators and quarterback coaches over the offseason. I didn’t include any of the unsigned recruits in my numbers for this, but it’s easy to see how they only exacerbate the divide.
Even more, you have players who were taken early who simply never panned out to be the quality of player that was expected of them when they committed. Players like Danny Clark or Jack Miller at Ohio State or Chase Brice at Clemson committed to their schools within expectations of being top-100 players, if not five-stars, and signed ranked outside of the top 300 prospects. The ability to evaluate a player with less data – recruiting camps, college camps, spring football of his junior season, sometimes even junior season film, the Elite 11, 7-on-7, and a dozen other metrics are all missing – makes a difficult job that much more difficult.
The results we have to lean on are clear: if you are an elite program recruiting quarterbacks at a consistently elite level, you should not be rushing to take early commitments, regardless of player talent. There are too many variables coming from coaching staff movement, player flips, missed evaluations, and changing roster dynamics to have the same level of comfort and accuracy you otherwise could if you take your time in evaluations. College coaches are frequently stubborn to change their process or reflect on new data and it’s difficult to tell someone to say no to commitments from top-end prospects, but the schools are better served by not rushing the timeline on these quarterbacks or trying to get them to jump into a commitment earlier than is necessary.