The Mystique of the “Offer”: How the Word has Evolved and What it Means Today
For this article we’re going to do things a little differently. This offseason there has been more controversy and confusion around the word “offer” than I have ever seen, and I thought it would be prudent to try and clear some things up about the word “offer” and how it has come to mean something different than it did even a few years ago. Even prior to this offseason there hasn’t been this much controversy surrounding the word, and I’ve talked to more than a few coaches, parents, and college football fans to try and clear up what some schools mean when they reach out to a kid with a offer. To begin, where a lot of this controversy has began is at the Division III level. As a former DIII football player who went through the recruiting process in the early 2010’s, I have seen the metamorphosis of DIII football as it changed from the forgotten and overlooked level of college ball into the much more spotlighted and marketable division it is today.
🙋♂️ Curious if someone can explain MIAC athletic offers to me? Maybe I missed something, but 1. You haven't been accepted into school 2. There are no roster size limits in this league 3. There is no football scholarship money
— Mike McElroy (@McElroy26) April 30, 2020
When I committed to St. Olaf College in 2012 to play my college ball, there was no formal recruitment process, no offers, and definitely no commitment ceremony once I decided I wanted to join the Oles. I did get some letters in the mail from DIII’s and a couple DII’s, but these were general invites to visit the campus or attend a prospect camp, and were more-so mass letters rather than personalized to just me. Honestly, it was my high school coaches who really got my “recruitment” started, as like a lot of other preps I didn’t really know the process of contacting a school and figuring out where I stood with them. This has since done a complete 180. With the growth of Twitter, schools and recruiters have a much easier time locating and contacting prep athletes, and can personalize the recruitment in a way much different than the phone calls from coaches I received during my senior year of high school. With more exposure and attention coming from social media as well, DIII commits have joined their higher level counterparts in holding commitment ceremonies, signing day events, and creating graphics listing their “Top-5” schools and the like. It’s definitely a good thing, as there is no reason why kids committing to DIII teams can’t have the same level of excitement surrounding their decisions, but it is definitely a lot different of a space than it was even half a decade ago. This is important to keep in mind, as DIII athletics operated in the way I came up knowing for a very long time, and now things are different and will continue changing.
Now let’s talk about the word “offer.” The word used to be – and still mostly is – used synonymously with a scholarship. This means that by its old definition, technically an “offer” really can only come from a Division II, NAIA, or DI schools, as DIII’s can only offer academic scholarships that shouldn’t have anything to do with athletics. To try and differentiate from the two, I tried to use the phase “roster spot” when a Division III recruit ones in contact with a DIII school in one of the various ways it happens, usually on Twitter. Technically, an athlete can just tell a DIII school that they are going to go try out for the team, and if that athlete is accepted into the school, there really isn’t anything stopping him from joining the team. This is especially true at school’s that don’t have as many kids on their rosters, and although you can technically walk-on at a DI, DII, or NAIA school’s team as well, they don’t usually need bodies as much as DIII’s and thus your chances of staying on the team, or even having fun playing football, are a lot slimmer. Things also get murkier when one remembers that there are DI non-scholarship programs such as the Ivy League and the Pioneer League (that St. Thomas just joined) that also reach out with “offers”, and those are still different than DIII “offers” despite their being no scholarships as it just isn’t as simple to join one of those teams willy nilly and there are caps to the number of players they can have on their rosters. So what does a DIII “offer” really entail and why the controversy? It really comes down to the fact that when DIII schools use the term “offer” it is essentially hollow.
As Bethel University’s DC Mike McElroy stated in April tweet linked above, kids get offered all the time without being accepted into the school, there are no roster limits in most DIII conferences, and there’s no scholarship money coming with this offer. In DIII sports, getting into the school really is an independent variable and is not swayed by the fact that you want to play football there like it is at a scholarship program. Sure, the coaches do have some influence with admissions staff, but getting into the school really depends on your grades, test scores, and application. This goes into the next point made by McElroy, as you can essentially offer as many kids as possible without any worry of overburdening your program. In scholarship programs you can offer only a certain amount of athletes, and if you over offer and kids start committing you can find yourself in deep waters. This is definitely not the case in the MIAC, as my good ol Oles would struggle to get 70 kids into the school and on the team while our counterparts St. John’s, St. Thomas, Concordia, and even sometimes Bethel would have roster numbers well into the hundreds. It got especially ridiculous with SJU and UST, as they would come into camp some years with upwards of 300 student athletes. Their roster numbers would be three deep at each number, and I’ve heard stories of kids at those schools being 10-15 people back on the depth chart as freshman. The dichotomy of roster sizes is ridiculous, and a lot of it comes from budgetary resources and the Title IX regulations you must meet at the DIII level, meaning if you can match the number of athletes in women’s athletics at your school and have the money to support that amount of kids, then there’s nothing stopping from you from having as many kids on your team as you can get. However, it’s not that easy for all schools, so one could argue it is unfair for schools with different athletic support to be handing out “offers” in a way that other schools in their conferences can’t. As McElroy replied in the tweet, it can be seen as bad information, as they aren’t really offering anything. If your check clears most of the time they will let you play, so it could be seen as an easy way to get interest rather than try to find out if the kid you’re recruiting is a good fit for the school and program, something that is a lot more important at the Division III level.
So why are schools even using the word “offer” and what does it even mean at the DIII level? As a replied to McElroy’s tweet in April, it is a good way to market your school, your team, and your interest in the recruit from the coaches perspective. They are “offering” you because they think you’re a good fit for their program and they want you to play there, and they want to “offer” you the chance to apply to their school and see if you get in. Not only that, it makes the kids feel good, and that’s not something that should be overlooked. With the percentage of high school football players who go onto play college ball – regardless of level – being so small, why shouldn’t they feel like their hard work is paying off and a school really wants them to play for there? For someone in my position who tracks recruiting, it also makes my job a lot easier, as I can see for a definite fact that a kid is getting looked at by a school and not have to try and figure out which coaches are following him on Twitter, which schools he’s visited, and if he’s even considering DIII football at all. What it really comes down to is recruits, coaches, and their parents really need to do their due diligence in researching the school that has just offered them, their player, or their kid. It’s never a bad idea to simply ask, but it can also be really useful to get on Google and find out what Division and Conference the school is in, and what that means in relation to the offer that was just extended. There is no right or wrong answer to the mystique of the offer, and there is no right or wrong way a DIII coach or recruiter should go about recruiting potential players for their teams. It really needs to come down to the athlete themselves understanding what a coach means when they offer you. My point of this article is to not persuade you one way or the other, but to simply lay out some of the factors surrounding the word “offer” and coaches uses of it in this day and age so you can make that decision yourself. It’s obviously complicated, and I really hope I wasn’t rambling in this article, but I wanted to give my best shot to try and clarify some things that have been really angering some people – especially in the DIII community. Thanks for reading, I hope you learned something and at best, I hope you enjoyed!