PABaseball posted:I have a hard time believing a P5 conference looking to climb the ranks and move towards an SEC/ACC level would put sanctions on the schools in their conference so that they could only sign players in July after their senior year of high school. One month before school starts kids already have housing deposits down, tuition paid for, and more often than not are already enrolled in classes. Kids committing to Big 10 programs have options, waiting until July to see money that might never come does not sound like a good option, especially when there are other strong programs recruiting you.
A kid from our summer team was committed to a Big 10 program, but was drafted and signed out of high school. I ran into the coach at a fall tournament and asked what he thought. He said that they weren't happy and thought he had a chance to start in the IF as a freshman, but were somewhat relived because he was on a 60% scholarship and with the draft not going the way they thought it would they would be able to bring their juniors back for their senior year and not have to cut as many freshmen.
So if there is a rule, it is not enforced or followed by anybody. I also read the post from that forum, it's just one guy on sharing information. I can't find anything else online that backs it up from after 2011. Chris Tracy hasn't been the IU coach for 6 years now, scholarships were not guaranteed for 4 years at the time either so likely old information.
Again, we can't confuse "commitment" with NLI. Many P5 commitments do not sign NLI's. This is not obvious to the casual observer. Clearly schools bringing in 20-22 players (freshman and transfers) are not offering athletic scholarships to all of them--they have freshman (who are on campus), sophomores, and juniors who all are on athletic scholarship already. Of course any NLI signed in November won't be an issue for another year and a few months. Lots of things change during that time.
So again, I believe the only "policies" are NCAA D1 Baseball regulations and the only "sanctioning" entity is the NCAA.