In less than 48 hours, UVa will finally kick off its 2020 football season. In a twist of fate, the Wahoos will do so at home rather than on the road in Blacksburg (or Atlanta, for that matter). But there won’t be any visitor lists that drop Saturday morning or all season long.

It’s the byproduct of the current era and one that continues to put 2021 recruits in an untenable position.

Last week the NCAA announced that it was extending the recruiting dead period through the remainder of the year. It was a move that came as a both an expected development and a sad one. As it stands, though some recruits told me in late summer that coaches had said the earliest they could visit would likely be January, it’s another blow to a recruiting class that is dealing with an incredible amount of uncertainty.

This is the part where I pause and say up front that amid a pandemic that has claimed more than 200,000 American lives, recruiting is obviously pretty far down the pecking order of what’s most important. That being said, to these high school seniors the opportunity of a lifetime has been completely upended and a decision that could set the course for their future is having to be made in a total void of information. And unless magically taking the virus off the table, the NCAA can step in here and provide much needed information.

My colleague Ryan Snyder from our Penn State site BlueWhiteIllustrated.com wrote the other day about the extended dead period, a decision he believes the NCAA had no choice but to make.

Snyder argued that the news shouldn’t have been a major surprise, even though previously the NCAA had been taking things on a month-to-month basis.

The crux of his point is that inviting recruits and their families to campus as normal only to then spend the afternoon with players and coaches “is just asking for another problem.” At the end of the day, coaches didn’t want to tell recruits no when realistically they didn’t want the risk to their programs that came with hosting visitors.

Josh Helmholdt, a national recruiting analyst who covers recruiting in the Midwest for Rivals, has argued for some time—and rightly so in my estimation—that the NCAA’s silence is the biggest issue.

The spring and summer saw a large number of commitments in part because some tried to grab spots amid the uncertainly. The worry, Helmholdt believes, is that players could be more likely to decommit down the road because many made their decisions going off of far less information than they should have had. After all, recruits haven’t been able to take visits—the reals ones, not the “drive through town” versions—since late February/early March, which is prime junior day season.

And there’s this other curveball: The NCAA is giving all current players a free year, essentially making it so that the 2020 season doesn’t count against them. That’s great news for players but confusing if not distressing news for 2021 recruits who haven’t been able to visit or camp and get a feel for the situations in front of them.

The worst part of all of this, Helmholdt has explained, is that the NCAA isn’t giving recruits any sense of what’s ahead. Will they be able to sign early? Will they still sign in February? Will they sign at all?

He believes the LOI should be eliminated for 2021 recruits and that they should instead sign grant-in-aid agreements, which would distribute the burden more evenly and give recruits more flexibility.

In my view, it makes sense that the added complexity from giving all players a free year will likely dampen the volatility of decommitments, since many recruits won’t want to risk losing their spot. After all, if they come open and then can’t find the right fit because School X now has a player getting an extra year, they’ll be left scrambling.

But not knowing what the signing situations will be, not knowing how the 85-scholarship limit will be handled in the future, and not knowing when they might actually be able to visit—a concern that understandably is next to impossible to answer—adds up to a series of circumstances that are simply unfair.

For UVa, things trended more toward normal in this cycle than most other schools. The Wahoos currently sit with 20 commitments, meaning they only have a handful of spots left heading into the fall. That’s typically how their classes are built.

But, what’s the future look like? In a few months, the ACC will either have played enough games to hold a championship game or things don’t get that far. When coaches fully swing back from season mode to recruiting mode, what will the circumstances look like? Will Bronco Mendenhall and Co. even know, when they would presumably be looking to fill the last few spots, how many spots they really have?

If there’s no early signing period, does that negatively impact schools like UVa that have a lot of hay in the barn? Will players feel pressured to sign with schools early in fear the NCAA will announce a firm 85 limit? And if they don’t sign and expect to sign in February, what if that moves back due to extended dead periods?

Hopefully, the string of questions above helps to illustrate the type of uncertainty facing many recruits. And frankly, coaches and recruiting coordinators are in a similar boat. They don’t know what’s next and they should.

It’s only fair to all involved for the NCAA to come out and say what’s next, to explain how the signing period(s) will work for 2021 recruits. Before they sign, they should know what the situations they are signing up for will entail, meaning the NCAA would provide some clarity and much needed stability to a recruiting process that continues to drift deeper into the unknown.

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