On Dec. 20, more than 60 college football programs will be busy preparing for bowl games. Many schools will be focused on completing new coaching hires. High school recruits and their families will be at home or traveling for the holidays.

They’ll all have to set aside their plans this year. Because an early signing period has finally arrived in college football, and the implications are both far-reaching and difficult to predict.

Recruiters believe Dec. 20 will, in fact, overtake the traditional first Wednesday in February as the massive, dramatic annual signing day event. Star-studded hat ceremonies are going down seven weeks earlier this year. Beyond that, nobody quite knows what to expect.

Start with the great unknown: How many prospects will sign in December? Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, chair of the NCAA Division I Football Oversight Committee, thinks it’s possible as much as 70 percent of all FBS signees will want to end their recruitments and ink their National Letters of Intent during the Dec. 20-22 signing period, according to research the committee conducted to help arrive at the date.

“I suspect there will be a large number that would like to get their recruitment over before the holidays and be able to move on,” Bowlsby told The All-American. “I think the early signing date will be very well received and highly used.”

Recruiters at both the Power 5 and Group of 5 level told The All-American their expectations are all of their prospects committed by that Dec. 20 date will sign. Based on a review of the top 100 signing day classes in the 2017 recruiting cycle, according to 247Sports composite rankings, the 70-percent estimate is reasonable. More than 66 percent of all signees had committed to their future programs by the end of December 2016. At the Power 5 level, 71 percent were pledged to the schools they signed with by then.

What coaches can’t predict today is how many of their commits will prefer to hold off on signing. Such a decision brings helpful clarity but also intriguing consequences. One common refrain from coaches about the Dec. 20-22 period echoes what Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin said earlier this year: “If a guy doesn’t sign in December, he’s not committed.”

Though that might sound like a pressure tactic, it’s the approach recruiters feel they must take. They’re interpreting the December signing period as a critical deadline.

“If you’re not signing, you’re not 100 percent,” Baylor coach Matt Rhule told The All-American. “I didn’t get to my wedding day and tell my wife, ‘Well, let’s just continue to date.’ If they sign, they’re with you. If they don’t sign, it doesn’t mean they’re not with you, but it means they’re still open. At least it brings reality where both the player and the school know exactly where they stand.”

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Rhule admits he was rooting for this early signing day to come while head coach at Temple. Any coach who prides himself on evaluating talent and forming relationships in recruiting wants to get his kids signed early. The last thing they want is other schools coming in and flipping their prized commits late in the game to fill needs.

From the coach’s perspective, locking up most of your class in December means less time making in-home visits in January and more time working ahead on the 2019 class. There’s peace of mind, too, in no longer having to fight all the way until the first Wednesday in February to keep a kid in the fold.

Not every coach sees it that way. At Pac-12 media days earlier this year, Washington State’s Mike Leach derided the concept of asking high schoolers to officially decide on their future even earlier than usual.

“I’m generally against that,” Leach said. “It depends when. Anything before December is ridiculous. Everybody forgets what it was like when they were 18. Maybe I remember better than some. Part of it is because I’m around 18-year-olds all the time. When you’re 18, trying to sort out a decision of where to go to college, you could make the argument February is challenging enough. All of a sudden you’re going to make a binding, significant decision, you move it up even more — it’s difficult.”

(Troy Taormina / USA TODAY Sports)

There will likely still be elite recruits, both committed and uncommitted, who want to take their official visits in January and take their recruitment all the way to the Feb. 7 signing day. And some less-coveted prospects will still be waiting for an offer or holding out for better options to arise. But how many are willing to wait?

One ACC assistant says he does talk with his pledges about signing in December, but it’s hard to know just how many will follow through. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for competitive reasons.

“They all say they’re going to,” he said. “Whether they do or not, it’s kind of in the air. You do talk about it. The biggest thing is they get to put it all to bed. The stress of recruiting mounts on them.”

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Complicating this entire early signing endeavor is the unpredictable coaching carousel, and nobody quite knows how one will affect the other.

In the past two winters, 39 of 49 new head coaching hires were made before Dec. 20. But that doesn’t mean the head coaches had their coaching staffs in place in time for that date. The period of time between conference championship games and the new signing period is just 18 days. Those two and a half weeks promise to be frenzied.

For athletic directors, the firing timeline doesn’t change much. Most coaches will get axed at the end of November. But the hiring timeline will be interesting to track. A coach waiting until after his bowl game to interview for another job, for example, seems less sensible in this new recruiting environment.

The intersection of coaching changes and early signing brings up another expectation: This will get messy for newly hired head coaches. Just ask Rhule, who left Temple for Baylor and quickly brought in 28 new recruits in just five weeks. His staff didn’t land its first pledge there until Dec. 28.

If recruits could sign in December last year, and a large majority of them did end their recruitments then, Rhule and his coaches would have been stuck fishing from a small pond in January.

“We would’ve been in a world of hurt,” he said. “It would’ve been a really, really not good thing for us last year.”

A recruiting coordinator at another Big 12 school expects the December signing period to be a “nightmare” for everyone involved in coaching transitions. Any recruit who signs in December must do so understanding their coaches could still leave at any moment. The process to get released from that binding NLI is rarely easy but could become more necessary in this new system.

“The timing is less than perfect,” Bowlsby acknowledged, “and that’s why the waiver process is in place.”

Bowlsby hopes the December signing period is a step closer to more progressive change. MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher chaired the early signing period working group and called the December date more of a compromise than a solution. The common complaint he heard from coaches was that, if he wanted a true early signing day, December isn’t early enough. Steinbrecher thinks a late July or early August signing period “makes a lot of sense.”

“You can make compelling pros and cons to any place you put the pin,” he said. “This was the place we ended up at. And is it the right place? I guess we’re gonna find out.”

Bowlsby would prefer to see a signing window from Sept. 1 to Nov. 1 in which schools can issue an NLI at any time for a prospect to sign. He thinks it would produce a more efficient and forthright recruiting system, one where schools no longer made 200-plus scholarship offers to fill 25 spots.

“In my estimation, it doesn’t go far enough,” Bowlsby said of the December period. “I think we’ll continue to look for signs that we ought to be doing something different.”

While coaches and recruiting coordinators are already starting to ponder the logistical aspects of how Dec. 20-22 will play out, they consistently agreed on one thing: They just don’t know what to expect. A Group of Five assistant called this the “trial year” to see what kids are going to want to do. The ACC coach sees far too many unknowns to truly forecast its impact.

“You’ve got to let it breathe a little bit and let it play out,” Steinbrecher said. “Do people behave in a manner you anticipated? What are the real and unintended consequences? We’ll see.”

(Top photo: Jason Getz/ USA TODAY Sports)