Nebraska football recruiting is about to be forced into big changes

Nebraska football recruiting and really college sports recruiting, in general, is going to have a rather big change forced upon it with a recent rule change.

On Thursday evening, a seismic shift in college sports took place, and for now, it doesn’t appear that it’s as big a story as it should be. The D1 Council voted in a change in policy that is not only rather impressively large but will be taking effect almost immediately.

The Council ushered in a new era for Nebraska football recruiting as well as all the other schools that are part of Division 1 sports. The rule change gets rid of the limit of official visits that a prospect can make during their recruitment. The only limit now will be that a prospect can only make one official visit to each school unless that school had a coaching change. College basketball will have the same rules as football, with the one difference being that prospects can take two official visits to the same school as long as they don’t occur in the same calendar year.

The D1 Council issued a statement on why this change is being implemented with a kind of “emergency clause.”

"“For young people considering where to go to college, visits to campus — both official and unofficial — are an integral part of the decision-making process. This was an opportunity to modernize NCAA rules in a way that provides greater and more meaningful opportunities for prospects going through the recruitment process.”"

The impact on Nebraska football recruiting and every other program out there isn’t hard to figure out. One need look no further than a prospect like Dylan Raiola to see how this could potentially have a negative effect on the Huskers. If the 5-star quarterback hasn’t made his mind up by July, he could potentially decide he wants to take a ton of other official visits and isn’t limited to five teams anymore.

Of course, for a program like Nebraska, which has some of the most state-of-the-art and impressive facilities to show off (and who will have even better facilities soon enough), getting players who might not have wanted to use up one of their five visits on Lincoln, to come and see what NU has to offer could be a massive boon.

There’s no doubt that recruiting budgets are going to have to be adjusted, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem for a program that’s about to be awash in network television money.

This rule change appears to be a net positive for Nebraska football recruiting.