Early Scholarship Offers

Over the weekend eight-grader Dylan Moses, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, went to a University of Alabama football event. While there Head Coach Nick Saban offered the eight-grader a scholarship for football. Now Dylan isn’t even in high school yet and his anticipated graduation date is 2017.  Recently it has become more popular for Division I schools to offer scholarships to kids not even in high school. Though it is more common for basketball it does happen quite often in football. The question is whether or not this practice is right or wrong. I believe that there is nothing wrong with it.

The first reason why I don’t believe this practice is wrong is because they are just verbal commitments. The school and the coaching staffs involved are just making a verbal commitment to the player based on several variables. The first is whether or not the player will be able to maintain the correct GPA. The second variable is whether or not the player continues to be a dominate force on the court or the field. A third variable is whether or not the player gets injured. Because these are just verbal commitments nothing is contractual and binding making it easy for the teams to back away if something is not right. 

The second reason nothing is wrong with this practice is because it allows the schools to see what kind of student-athlete they are going to get. After offering a young student a scholarship, the schools will be able to tell whether or not they are going to want the player on the team. If the player becomes lazy or satisfied, the coaches will be able to tell. If this occurs, the coaches are most likely not going to offer the player a scholarship when it comes to the actual time to offer the scholarship to the player.

The third reason it is not wrong is because it is becoming a common practice. With this, if a school is not participating in such recruiting practices they will lose players because they will end up “late to the party.” Losing players will result in losing games and quite simply that is not worth it for what the coast of an early verbal scholarship costs. The reward is bigger than the risk. 

While many might consider this practice to be wrong, I believe that it is a low risk high reward practice that ultimately is nothing more than a “IF” commitment because of all that variables that must go right in order for the commitment to come to tuition. So, good luck Dylan. Continue to do what you do on the field and the classroom, but don’t believe that you have a scholarship no matter what because you are still going to have to work for it.

-JM

P.S-I am sorry about not posting that often this past week. Currently with work and school I have been very busy leaving a little amount of time for the blog. I just wanted to let you know.