Portal:American football/Selected article/July, 2007

Recruiting, in college athletics, is the term used for the process whereby college coaches add new players to their roster of student-athletes each off-season. In most instances, it involves a coach extending a scholarship offer to a player who is about to graduate from high school or a junior college. There are instances—mostly at lower-division universities—where no scholarship can be awarded and the player has to pay for all of his or her own tuition, housing, and book fees.

Since success or failure in recruiting is seen as a precursor of a team's future prospects, many college sports fans follow it as closely as the team's actual games and it also provides a way to be connected to the team during the long off season. Fans' desire for information has spawned a million-dollar industry which first developed extensively during the 1980s. Prior to the internet, popular recruiting services used newsletters and pay telephone numbers to disseminate information. Since the mid-1990s, many online recruiting websites have offered fans player profiles, scouting videos, player photos, statistics, interviews, and other information, including rankings of both a player and a team's recruiting class. Most of these websites charge for their information.

In the United States, college football recruiting is the most-followed sports recruiting. This is due mainly in part to the large following football usually has at most Division-I universities. Division I-A football also has the highest number of scholarship players (85) of any other college sport. The NCAA allows football teams to add up to 25 new scholarship players to the roster per academic year, so long as the total number of scholarship players does not exceed 85. Scholarship limits are lower for Division I-AA (63) and Division II (36) teams.

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