I saw it on the Internet, so it must be binding.

Andy Staples has a suggestion to fix college football recruiting.  No, not this one:  “I still believe that eliminating signing day entirely and allowing schools to sign players at any point in high school…”

This one:

Allow schools to publicize when they’ve offered a player a scholarship.

He offers several rationales for doing so which range from possibly relevant (“Some of them [schools] wouldn’t offer so many players”) to irrelevant (“No recruit would lie about getting an offer, either”).

There’s a third one that’s certainly well meaning, but I’m not sure how much real world effect it would have.

• It would turn up the heat on coaches who pull offers.

Go back and look at the Clemson offer that receiver Justyn Ross posted (and ultimately accepted). It’s full of disclaimers. He must qualify academically. He must continue to demonstrate good character. He must “continue to display the athletic characteristics consistent with a Clemson Tiger.” In other words, he must keep being good at football. Most scholarship offer letters—though not all social media offer graphics—contain this sort of language. And it’s perfectly understandable if a coach pulls an offer because a player is flunking classes or balloons to 400 pounds or knocks over a liquor store or waits to commit until the team has filled its allotment at the player’s position. What isn’t so understandable is when a player has an offer and commits months before signing day and then gets told there is no room for him in the class shortly before signing day. If the coach liked the player enough to post the scholarship and the player didn’t do anything that ran afoul of the disclaimers, the coach had better have a really good explanation for why he has no scholarship for the player. This could keep players from getting squeezed at the end of the process.  [Emphasis added.]

In response to the highlighted portion of that, so what?  Does anyone really think Bobby Petrino would care?  What about any coach on the proverbial hot seat who has a chance to displace a three-star for a better option at the last minute?

Every once in a while, we hear about high school coaches who get ticked off at a college coach for ditching one of his kids at the last moment — Spurrier did it a few seasons ago and Smart did it a couple of years ago.  I’m not sure how a school posting a scholarship offer publicly is going to shame a coach into sticking with it.  Most coaches are pretty shameless when it comes to recruiting.

What are y’all’s thoughts?