Recruiting in college football can be a strange world.

Every year, thousands of players are offered scholarships by SEC programs, even though the 14 schools in the SEC can only sign around 350 total players (if each program averages signing 25 players).

So what happens to the players who are offered by SEC schools but don't sign?

Some of them obviously go outside of the SEC via their own choice. Some of those players, however, don't have actually have "committable offers".

That's the thing with college football offers — they aren't always actually offers. It's more of a situation where a program is saying "hey we see you, we notice you, we're keeping up with you".

Sports Illustrated touched on this issue in 2019, revealing how many offers were made by Power-5 programs over an eight-year period:

From SI.com:

The study, covering the last eight recruiting cycles, produced galling figures within college football’s major conferences: more than 101,000 scholarship offers issued in order to fill about 12,000 available scholarships. For the 2019 cycle alone, the 65 programs in Power 5 conferences made more than 15,000 scholarship offers in order to secure what is expected be about 1,600 signees. That’s an average of about 237 offers per school per year, a 100-offer increase from the average in 2012. In what is believed to be a first for a college program, Louisville hit the 400-offer mark in 2017, and six programs have delivered at least 400 offers this year. One-fifth of Power 5 teams handed out at least 300 offers this cycle, for classes that do not often exceed 25 members. Just seven years ago, no school surpassed the 300-offer mark.

During the 2020 recruiting cycle, Tennessee handed out a whopping 495 offers. Alabama handed out 256 offers during the same recruiting cycle.

New Vols head coach Josh Heupel and his staff, however, are doing things differently.

Tennessee's new staff isn't handing out bogus offers. Instead, they're being up front with kids, which inevitably will build plenty of trust on the recruiting trail.

Three-star cornerback Davison Igbinosun recently spoke to VolQuest about the Vols' recruiting process. And he made it clear that Tennessee is being up front with recruits.

"He is a genuine man and was completely up front with me about the process,” said Igbinosun of Vols defensive coordinator Tim Banks. “He was telling me how they like to take their time with kids and make offers that are committable and not do what some other programs do."

Recruiting is all about trust. Tennessee's new coaching staff doesn't have much equity on the recruiting trail right now, so it's imperative that trust is built.

It sounds like Heupel and his staff are approaching things the right way.

And it should pay dividends in recruiting in the coming months/years.

Featured image via UTAD