Joey McGuire thinks the jury is still out on his coaching acumen even after winning three state championships at Cedar Hill High School.

“I don’t know if I’m a good coach,” McGuire joked on the Division I coaches’ panel at THSCA Coaching School. “I had 98 Division I football players (from 2003-16). I could get them on the bus, and we played really well.”

McGuire wanted his Cedar Hill players to commit to a college as soon as possible to relieve the stress before their senior football season. Now at Texas Tech, he still considers himself a high school coach getting to coach college football. So he favored a potential June Signing Day for high school recruits before senior year.

Per ESPN’s Pete Thamel, college conference commissioners voted down an introduction of the June signing window on June 19. For the 2025 cycle, Early Signing Day will be held on Dec. 4, while National Signing Day is on February 5.

While the implementation is tabled, the debate is not. UTSA’s Jeff Traylor, a legendary head coach at Gilmer High School, echoed McGuire’s sentiment on wanting his high school players to commit as soon as possible. But on the college side, he believes a June signing period would allow Group of Five coaches to waste less time recruiting players who are set to go Power Four.

“A&M and Texas, they pretty much know who they’re going to get,” Traylor said. “They get that over with (in June). What does that do for us at UTSA? We now know where to go to spend our time recruiting.”

But Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko is on record as 1000 percent against a June Signing Day. Since the December Signing Day was enacted in 2017, an increasing number of the top high school recruits have enrolled for college classes in the spring of what should be their high school senior year. Of the Top 100 recruits in the Class of 2024 per 247Sports, 72 were on campus for spring football practices. Elko also foresees there will be more examples, such as five-star quarterbacks JT Daniels and Quinn Ewers reclassifying to skip senior year entirely. 

“If you look at what happened when you moved the Signing Day to December, now 80% of the kids enroll in the spring,” Elko said. “If you project that out and move the signing date to June, I think over the course of 3,4, 5 years, you’re going to start having 50, 60. 70% of the kids reclassify. I don’t think that’s good for anyone. I don’t think that’s good for high school football, I don’t think necessarily that’s good for the kids to not finish their development of high school, and I don’t know that it’s great to put a high school senior on a college campus at that alarming rate.”

North Texas head coach Eric Morris, whose father was a longtime high school coach, reiterated Elko’s assessment that signed players would opt out physically or mentally their senior year.

“I don’t like the early Signing Day,” Morris said. “I think it’s bad for high school coaches and for kids to be signed and then not put a big emphasis on their senior year.”

Traylor and McGuire shrugged off the concern that high school opt-outs would increase with a June signing day, saying a scholarship offer wouldn’t be extended if the recruit intended to forgo his senior year.

“If I’m a college football coach and the kid commits to me in June and he decides not to play his senior year because he’s going to come play for me, I probably wouldn’t take that kid, to be honest with you,” Traylor said. “I want a guy that loves to play the game of football. I don’t want that. He’s going to do the same thing to me.”

The coaches in favor of a June Signing Day spent the majority of their careers as a high school coach, while the coaches opposed have been college lifers. 

But there is some consensus: this year’s calendar, with Early Signing Day on Dec.4 as opposed to Dec. 20-22, is better for everyone. College programs can close off during December and focus on bowl game preparation. Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian also pointed out that high school recruits are protected from transfers taking their offers now that signing day occurs before the Transfer Portal opens.

“I think last year, the high school player was not protected, where the signing date was in the middle of December and the portal opened and some schools were dropping high school kids because they were taking the portal kid,” Sarkisian said. “I think now, we’re still protecting the high school kid in early December and then we can get ourselves into the portal.”