Cal8285;702398 said:
The school IS making a binding commitment. The school is bound to give the athlete a scholarship for one year. There will be conditions, generally to qualify academically, the most common condition being high school graduation. But the conditions aren't under the control of the coach, they are generally under the "control" of the athlete.
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But the LOI is binding on the school, even if it oversigns.
The following quote from an article on oversigning says exactly the opposite.
Quoting from this linked article:
http://collegefootball.about.com/od/rulesofthegame/a/Oversigning-College-Footballs-Hidden-Problem_2.htmThe Elliott Porter situation speaks to the very reason oversigning.com exists. Elliott Porter was one of the first verbal commitments to LSU's 2010 recruiting class and signed a letter of intent with LSU on National Signing Day. Elliott enrolled early and was on campus for summer conditioning when he got the news that Les Miles had made the decision that there wouldn't be room for him in the 2010 recruiting class and that the only way that he could remain at LSU was if he would accept a greyshirt, pay his own way and rejoin the football team in January of 2011.
Porter, outraged and disappointed at the news, refused the greyshirt offer and asked to be released from his letter of intent, which is a one-way binding agreement, so that he could find another school to go to on scholarship. He eventually landed at Kentucky on scholarship, but not before airing his grievances with Les Miles and LSU. According to Porter, he was never asked or warned about the possibility of having to take a greyshirt; he was completely caught off guard at the last minute.
[COLOR="red"]
The Letter of Intent that high school recruits sign is a one-way binding agreement that prevents players from changing their mind and going to another school between the period that they sign the letter, which is in February of their senior year of high school, and the time they actually arrive on campus, which sometimes is as late as August of the same year.[/COLOR] Once a recruit signs the letter of intent, they "belong" to the school so to speak, and the only way they can get out of that agreement is to ask the school to sign a release. [COLOR="red"]
The issue with this agreement is that the school is not obligated to give the recruit a scholarship; in fact, they are not obligated to do anything as a result of accepting a signed letter of intent. It is simply a signed agreement by the recruit to attend a certain school and it prohibits the recruit from being able to accept grants-in-aid from another university[/COLOR].
Certain coaches, such as Huston Nutt, Les Miles and Nick Saban, have used the LOI as a tool to keep recruits from going to other schools despite not actually having room for them. The NCAA by-laws state that a school can only have 25 new scholarship players enter the program every year and a max of 85 total players on the roster, [COLOR="Red"]
but there is nothing that limits the letters of intent they can accept and nothing that binds the school to honor the letter of intent with an actual scholarship.[/COLOR] Coaches can technically sign as many players as their conference will allow them and prior to 2009 the SEC had no limits on the number of players the coaches could sign. This is only part of the problem. In addition to being able to accept an unlimited amount of signed letters of intent, coaches have found that they can hedge their bets against future attrition (medical, grades, arrests, etc) by oversigning their roster, which is done by accepting more letters of intent than you have room for under the 85 scholarship limit.
