Tennessee Has 187 Offers to 2010 Prospects But Can Only Sign 28

When Houston Nutt signed 37 players to football scholarships at Ole Miss back in February, he knew several would not qualify academically. After all, the NCAA only allows a maximum of 25 scholarship players in any one recruiting class. Thus it was no surprise last week when SEC Commissioner Mike Slive told his coaches they would only be allowed to sign 28 prospects to letters of intent from now on.

This puts the Tennessee Volunteers in a bit of tight spot. The website Gridironstuds.com has counted up and found that Lane Kiffin (above) and his staff have already made scholarship offers to a few more prospects than that. And by "a few" I mean "a metric boatload." The Vols have 187 offers out there for the class of 2010.

Insert your own "doesn't Tennessee have a math department?" joke here. Kiffin went to Fresno State anyway. But what are the Vols going to do?

Come on. If the past few years of the ever-escalating recruiting arms race have taught us anything, it's that a scholarship offer is about as binding as a verbal commitment. Until a letter of intent is signed, the offer can always be pulled by either party.

Still, the math says that less than 15% of the players Tennessee has offered will actually get a scholarship. There are some perfectly understandable reasons why a school might offer significantly more scholarships than it can actually award. Some players won't qualify, for instance. Likewise, most top-level recruits get more than one scholarship offer. Some get more than a dozen.

A look at Tennessee's list of offers reveals gobs of five-star and four-star prospects, many of whom have already committed to other schools and many more of whom will wind up signing somewhere else. I think this strategy of rampant overoffering is dangerous, though. Even the best teams have a handful of players who weren't highly regarded as prospects. If you spam a zillion offers to every five-star prospect in the country, those three-star or less prospects have to know that, to them, a scholarship offer from you means about as much as an e-mail from somebody claiming to be a relative of a recently deceased corrupt Nigerian bureaucrat.

Some of those kids will be told "Golly whiz, I know we said we had a scholarship for you, but a funny thing happened ..." and wind up signing with one of your rivals. Will they let bygones be bygones? That, my friends, is a sucker bet. College football is an emotional game, after all.