There may be no bigger date on the calendar for college football teams than signing day, since personnel overwhelmingly dictates a team’s ultimate success or failure. For the past two years, players have also been able to sign during a brief window in December, as Smith did, but signing day is still when ultimate judgment about coaches’ recruiting is rendered.

“For college football, recruiting is the lifeblood,” said Luke Stampini, a recruiting analyst at 247Sports. “If you’re not recruiting well, you’re probably not going to be around for long.”

The uniform photo-op arguably reflects broader currents in child rearing. It could be cast as helicopter-parenting — or perhaps the next generation of helicopter-parenting, in which the parent ropes down from the chopper right after his child.

“This is the era of ‘we’ parenting, i.e., ‘We have a midterm. We’ve got a game tomorrow. We’re being recruited by top-tier schools,’” Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford administrator and the author of “How to Raise an Adult,” said in an email.

“If the child is wearing a jersey signaling their recruitment status, the we-speaking parent wants that cool jersey, too,” she said, adding, “But where does this intertwined-ness stop?”

What the novelty undeniably reveals is a crucial secret to recruiting nowadays. For all the talk that prognosticators may offer about how well a certain linebacker meshes with a certain coordinator’s defensive philosophy or how successful a college program is at developing players for the N.F.L., much of recruiting comes down to the more basic element of feel. Even for top football players, college football is also college, and that means getting the family to sign on, too.

“The recruiting process is not just about the player. They can’t recruit the player. They’ve got to recruit the family,” said Jamal Hill, who posed alongside his older brother, Jeffrey, who got to wear Oregon’s neon green uniform as opposed to Jamal’s black one.