Signings of the times: Banished letters of intent, shrunk transfer window equals more college chaos

The time-honored tradition of high school athletes proudly sitting behind a table and signing a national letter of intent is a thing of the past. In its place starting in a matter of weeks, athletes will ink their name to something different — a financial aid package that will likely be tied to a revenue-sharing contract.

Coaches reacted with a mix of shock and confusion to the latest end of business as usual in college sports. The NCAA announced the death of the letter of intent last week on the same day it introduced a newly condensed schedule for signing players out of the transfer portal.

“There’s been so much going on, so many moving pieces in the middle of our season, that quite honestly, myself and a bunch of our colleagues, we have no idea what the heck is going on,” Kentucky football coach Mark Stoops said after hearing about the latest changes.

All the changes are, in some way, related to the antitrust settlement a federal judge conditionally approved last week that will result in universities paying their athletes directly through a revenue-sharing program. And that stems from a series of legal and legislative rulings that have allowed college athletes to make money on the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) since July 2021.

With no national law to pull things together, and with the NCAA’s rulemaking authority gutted by the courts, a group called the Conference Commissioners Association, which has looked over letters of intent for decades, made the recommendation to do away with them for good.

What was the national letter of intent and why did it matter?

National letters of intent date to 1964 and used to be a rite of passage, a sign that a player had “made it.” They were a player’s signed word that he or she would play for at least one year at a certain university.

When players started being able to earn money in 2021, and when they became able to transfer without as many restrictions as in the past, the letters became less important than the financial arrangements that accompanied them, including terms of the NIL deals the players were signing through third parties that supported their soon-to-be school.

Now that the schools are headed toward paying players directly, instead of signing the letter, the players will sign a financial aid agreement that will likely be paired with a contract dictating the terms of their revenue-sharing agreement.

Michael LeRoy, a labor law professor at Illinois familiar with college athletics, said the changes will have an impact. He predicted that bidding for transfers will be less active -- and lucrative – when revenue sharing becomes a primary focus for schools and NIL deals will become more “limited to an athlete’s intrinsic brand or marketing value.”

The change also comes as college athletes, notably in California and New Hampshire, seek to be recognized as school employees with the right to collectively bargain for pay and benefits – a proposal schools are fighting in court.

“It’s amazing to see that the faster and farther the NCAA runs away from employment, and even ‘pay-to-play,’ the more their workarounds create a direct financial relationship with their athletes that looks like employment,” LeRoy said.

The new rules prohibit other schools from recruiting a player once the player has signed that aid agreement. Players used to be able to sign aid letters with more than one school, then make sure the NIL money (or other factors) were lined up for their first choice.

Since details of the lawsuit settlement won’t be finalized until spring, it means revenue sharing won’t officially be allowed when the early signing period for football opens on Dec. 4. NIL deals are still allowed, though players won’t be able to back away from the school they sign with, whether next month (for most sports), on Dec. 4 (early football) or on national signing day for football, which is Feb. 5.

“We’re getting blown up by recruits and we don’t have any answers for them,” Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “We don’t have answers for the settlement, we don’t have answers for (NIL), we don’t have answers for National Letter of Intent. We don’t have a lot of answers right now on the portal.”

What’s new with the transfer portal and why does that matter?

Since it started becoming exponentially easier for players to transfer, the numbers game has grown more difficult for coaches. They have to figure out how many players are returning, how many are leaving, how many are coming from other schools and how many are coming from high school. Many have responded by adding general managers and beefing up their personnel departments.

While the transfer portal has been viewed as something of a necessary evil of the open market, without rules to strictly regulate it, it has turned into something of a free-for-all. Coaches say roster tampering is not uncommon.

Trimming the amount of time the portal is open by 15 days is not certain to bring more order to roster building.

“I don’t know that I totally buy into the exact dates,” said Kansas coach Bill Self, acknowledging concerns that the basketball period that begins after the second round of March Madness will shrink the time for players on Sweet 16 teams to decide.

Some football coaches were hoping to eliminate the spring window completely, but there will still be 10 days in April where players can enter the portal.

“My hope is that some of this stuff will start to come to fruition sooner than later, so you have an idea of how to move forward,” TCU football coach Sonny Dykes said. “Because it’s like anything. If you don’t, the people that are going to suffer are going to be the players.”

How will roster limits impact all of this?

Ultimately, all these changes impact how a coach builds a roster. Under terms of the lawsuit settlement, they will now work with roster limits (105 players for football, 15 for basketball) instead of scholarships (85 for football, 13 for men’s basketball).

Each school will have to decide what it can afford. Last week, for instance, Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel sent a letter to fans saying if the school offered scholarships for all the spots available under the new limits, it would add $29 million to the $21 million in revenue-sharing funds Michigan plans to distribute to its athletes.

Even wealthy schools like Michigan do not have millions of dollars readily available to pay athletes. Manuel hinted at fans needing an “openness to developing new revenue streams”, in what sounded like a suggestion that fans might be coughing up more money in the future. Tennessee is already planning that step with a “talent fee” for 2025 football season ticket renewals.

Dykes said the new roster limits will change everything from how he runs practice to the kind of developmental player he’d be willing to take a chance on.

“It’s complicated, I understand, and there’s a lot of possibilities and opportunities,” Dykes said. “But you want the players ultimately to be taken care of. You just hope that those decision-makers keep that in mind.”

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AP sports writers Dave Skretta, Stephen Hawkins, Larry Lage, John Zenor and Pete Iacobelli contributed to this report.

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