I want to emphasize what Leftside said: the risk is entirely on the player who is recruited early (or before) the HS career has some legs.
i am close to several top twenty programs. Each casts its net wide and early. There is absolutely no downside risk to each program; even though every year there are multiple verbal commitments which don't ripen to NLI's, the line of other recruits simply step over the bodies of those who fell.
Sound advice on both what these early commitments really mean and the fact that this IS a business. I would also be the first point to my child not knowing what they want for lunch let alone what they want to "be when they grow up". However, I would like to point to the sentence that "the top 20 programs cast their nets wide and EARLY".
I don't condone early commitment, I think both you and Leftside are correct that it mostly benefits the school, not the player. The point I was trying to get across is that recruitment doesn't START in 11th grade like it use to, whether kids are ready for it or not seems to be irrelevant. If your kid has high hopes of playing for that top 10 school, or that local D1, starting to get his name out in 11th grade would be a mistake, your time line has just been sped up.