Oversigning in college football

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has established rules and an enforcement policy concerning the allowable total number and annual number of football recruits.  Bylaw 15.5.6.1 of the Division I Manual states that Division I football programs are allowed to have 85 total football players on scholarship and may sign a maximum of 25 players per year. The NCAA requires strict adherence to the total scholarship limit.  However, many teams engage in “oversigning,” openly recruiting more than 25 players in a given year.  Public statements by athletic program leaders indicate a disregard for the intent and spirit of the annual scholarship limits

Oversigning allows coaches to stockpile talented players to improve their teams’ competitive advantage and/or limit the competitive advantage of their rivals by hoarding scarce talent and making it unavailable to them (Shelley, 2012). It also allows coaches to rectify past mistakes in recruiting and to improve their flexibility and options within a current recruiting class (Bateman, 2011; Staples, 2011a).  Oversigning can also have an adverse effect on young men who become trapped by the commitments they make to schools that fail to reciprocally commit to them.  Nevertheless, annual oversigning is largely ignored by the NCAA and yet, despite the lack of penalties, not all teams engage in the practice.

We used the pressure-opportunity model of organizational misconduct to examine the underlying causes of oversigning and the extent of oversigning among NCAA Division 1 (Bowl Championship Subdivision) football programs.  The model incorporates organizational and environmental pressures, opportunities and predispositions. The data sample spans ten years with the total sample of teams in a given year varying from 114 to 120, with a total of 1152 annual team observations.  We found that only environmental factors were significant reasons for oversigning. We discuss our results in the context of possible reasons why the NCAA ignores enforcement of its bylaws.