Eli Drinkwitz, Ryan Day Unite on Need for Changes to NCAA Current Recruitment Schedule
Just over 24 hours before the Ohio State Buckeyes and Missouri Tigers face off against one another in the 2023 Goodyear Cotton Bowl, head coaches Ryan Day and Eli Drinkwitz had a moment of unity.
The respective helmsmen of the No. 7 Buckeyes and No. 9 Tigers echoed the need for changes to be made to the current recruiting schedule in place from the NCAA during a press conference on Thursday.
Drinkwitz spoke first, listing all of the things that take place at once during the month of December. The Missouri coach then threw the 12-team playoff format (which begins next season) into the mix, to further his point about balancing all of those elements at the same time is "not possible."
"I don't know that there's any one thing that has to be changed, I think there has to be a collective group that gets together and decides that really we have to rearrange a lot of it," Drinkwitz said. "There's no way possible for us to have a 12-team playoff next year, and be recruiting in an open period, and have transfer-portal additions and subtraction going on and be preparing for a game. It's just not possible."
So what should the next step be in order to fix this seemingly broken system? Drinkwitz says the answer is to take everything back to square one.
"There's gonna have to be a reset of college football, looking back 'Okay this is what we've become now,'" Drinkwitz said. "Right now, we've got a wheel, a bicycle wheel, and we've taken the middle part right out, and then we just decided 'Alright, we'll just see how it figures out.' We've got to start all over and build it back out again, and it's going to start with having to figure out the calendar."
Day echoed Drinkwitz's sentiments, adding that coaches and schools from all across the country have to begin making decisions together, regardless of their size or conference.
"I agree with really everything coach (Drinkwitz) just mentioned," Day said. "I think when big decisions like this need to be made, we struggle in college football because everyone is coming at it from a different point of view...While I don't have good answers, we all have to come together and make some hard decisions, and like coach (Drinkwitz) said, I don't think we can just patch it up and say 'Let's put a patch on this right here.' We gotta look at this thing from a big picture, and then start from scratch and go from there, and there's a lot that goes with that."
