Kalen DeBoer reacts to NCAA eliminating NLI, reveals how it affects recruiting

The NCAA announced on Wednesday that it will be eliminating the National Letter of Intent program from college athletics, which has been in place since 1964.

Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer reacted to the news, revealing how it may affect binding recruits to schools, including his own.

“It really won’t affect [it],” DeBoer said, responding to a caller on ‘Hey Coach’ on Wednesday. “There’ll be more stuff, I think, that we’ll get educated on here. A lot of times the information comes out and then our compliance office comes in and meets with us. It doesn’t affect anything, literally, today or tomorrow, but I think a lot of it will still be as we’ve done in the past.

“There’ll be other ways to bind prospects who sign with Alabama and vice versa. So I don’t see it being something — at least with the tweaks that they’re going to make. There’s an SEC agreement, there are other things that we have that the guys can sign that will be binding. I’ll find out more, because we will have those meetings here when all that information is complete, and we’ll meet with our compliance and meet as a whole staff with them more and be able to maybe answer your question a little bit better.”

According to On3’s Pete Nakos, financial aid packages and scholarship agreements are expected to be used in place of the NLI system. Nakos noted that the program isn’t entirely going to be thrown out and that players transferring into programs typically sign athletics aid agreements instead of an NLI like a recruit coming out of high school.

The Collegiate Commissioners Association met last month to discuss moving on from the NLI, and now DeBoer and the rest of the coaches in the country have to be educated on what the plan is to bind these soon-to-be signees to his school.

These details will have to be ironed out before 2024’s early national signing day, which is set for Wednesday, Dec. 4.