Early Wednesday evening, Alabama football coach Nick Saban walked into a scheduled news conference to discuss the continuing workouts for the Rose Bowl national semifinal against Michigan and the 23 new Crimson Tide players who had signed earlier that day.
It would have been easier to ask the 72-year-old what he didn’t have going on.
“When we made the early signing date a few years ago, we said this would become the signing date,” Saban said. “It also moved the recruiting calendar up like six months. Most guys visit now in the summertime. We used to have tons of guys visit in January, and now we’ll have very few guys visit in January.
“The whole thing has pushed forward, and there are just a lot of things happening right now that take our time, focus and attention. Our recruiting is important. We’ve got a game coming up that’s important. We’re trying to manage our time the best that we can.”
Although it can be difficult to shed tears for those who have annual salaries in Saban’s neighborhood, the lives of college football coaches are far more chaotic compared to a decade ago. The early signing period has significantly reduced any summer freedom, and the implementation of the NCAA transfer portal has resulted in a roster management game that knows no boundaries.
In a sense, current coaches really don’t know when one day ends and another begins.
“The dynamics are so different now that your roster has an opportunity to leave at the end of the year as they look for the right place, right time and right fit for themselves,” Tennessee’s Josh Heupel said Wednesday afternoon. “There are a lot of things that go into it, and the hardest thing in our landscape is the uncertainty of the numbers, whether that’s the entire roster or certain position groups.
“Kids will still be going in the portal here until January, so you’re constantly evaluating your roster and where you’re at and what your needs are.”
The traditional signing date, which has long been the first Wednesday in February, always served as the end of a cycle. The early signing period then became somewhat of an end, as nearly 90% of the nation’s top prospects instantly started signing in December and not waiting several more weeks.
Both the early signing period and the portal were implemented by the NCAA late in 2018, with the portal having two windows annually — one running for 30 days at the end of the regular season, and the other for 15 days in late April.
“That’s the bad part about it right now, because it never stops,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga coach Rusty Wright said. “You kind of have the team you’ve got in the fall. You’ve got a team you go through spring with, and then you’ve got a team you figure out in the summer. That part of it is not stopping now, either, and that’s OK.
“I think the last couple of years we’ve done a better job of identifying some things and handling some things, and we’ve had to change some things timing-wise. It’s constantly moving and changing. It changes daily sometimes. It’s crazy right now.”
ESPN reported that since this current window of the transfer portal opened Dec. 4, a whopping 1,822 FBS players had entered as of Wednesday.
“The portal is a good thing, so let’s don’t make it a negative,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. “If you’ve been in a program for three years and you’re not playing and it doesn’t look great, you might need to look somewhere else, and that’s an OK thing.
“It’s when you’re in your first year and you’re doing that. That’s when it becomes a little more alarming.”
December was once viewed as an opportunity for college coaches to catch their respective breaths after the regular season and enjoy some brief down time before bowl practices, the bowl game and the January stretch run to February’s signing day. Now it’s one of the busiest months of the calendar, and finding breaks throughout the year is getting tougher and tougher in the fluid world of roster management.
“It’s like grocery shopping,” Smart said. “You can’t go get groceries unless you know what you have at home. The hardest part is the timing of everything. People say, ‘You know what you’ve got on your team,’ but you don’t technically because it’s not over.
“We have to be careful that we don’t get more bottled water than we need. We’ve got to get more bread to match up with our sandwich meat. This portal window is just so wide that it’s hard to know what you’re going to have.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.