Can anybody clarify as to exactly (or at least, roughly) how many Schollies we actually have to offer in this cycle?
To answer your question -- regardless of how many threads there are on the topic -- no. I don't think the most connected person here and probably no one on the staff could really answer the question as to how many commitments they'll take in a given year until they actually get down the final few guys in February.
I'm not saying your question is a bad one, but merely that it is impossible to answer these days. I feel like there was a time in the 90s where this question made a ton more sense. Yes, there were always departures in the off-season or a non-qualifier here or there, but for a long time a few things were true:
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The roster had a lot more stability to it. Yeah, there could be a transfer or two and an a career-ending injury from time to time, but there wasn't a ton of kids jumping ship each year, getting kicked off, getting ruled medically ineligible due to concussions, or not being offered a 5th year. There also weren't as many early NFL entries -- you could pretty much assume that anyone not in the Freeney/McNabb/Donovin Darius class would likely use up all of their eligibility and even those aforementioned guys were exhausted their eligibility. Now we get kids giving up a year to go undrafted. Happens a lot. All that makes number of scholarships nearly impossible to predict.
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Commits used to be committed, by and large. Yeah, there were times when a kid might back out but usually when you got a commit in the P era, that kid would still be a commit in February. It was so much the case that everyone was furious when Schiano came in and started actively recruiting syracuse commits early and often. Well, fast-forward 10 or 15 years and now for every 20 kids you sign, you'll probably have close to 3 or 4 who initially commit but end up elsewhere.
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New style of recruiting. That previous point sort of overlaps with this one, but with everyone poaching each other's recruits, kids getting grayshirted, a ton of kids getting offered, committing, signing and then not qualifying, coaching changes, early enrollees ... anyway, you get the point. You can pretty much bank on three or four decommits, 2-3 non-qualifiers signing and 2-3 early enrollees being back-dated to the previous class. Anyway, even if you only have 20 schollies available in that particular class, you are probably going to get 25+ signatures on signing day plus another 2, 3, 4 kids who originally committed and ended up elsewhere.
Anyway, bottom line for me is, bank on SU bringing at least 20 kids on campus each year and bank on close to 25 signing each year. It's the new way and should save a lot of people work and headaches in the process.
