Commitment is a two way street. If you don’t give it you shouldn’t expect to receive it. That is also fair. When coach after coach cuts bait on a recruit because the player gets injured or a better player becomes available, they establish a course of dealing that justifies the actions of the recruit that bails on the coach. When coaches behave this way, there is no implied commitment from the coach and one should not be expected from the player. This is very logical and fair behavior from a moral perspective but also from a legal perspective.
What Cale did does not make him a bad person, but it does set a precedent that makes it more likely that he will go back on his word in the future. Once you get away with going back on your word once, it makes it easier to talk yourself into doing it again. It’s a slippery moral slope that is hard to reverse and can lead to poor character.
“Slippery moral slope that is hard to reverse and can lead to poor character”, over a 17-year-old changing his mind? I find this to be a little, mmmm, dramatic.
When I was a high school senior, I applied, (non-binding) early action to a certain catholic university in Indiana. My dad went there. I could name the two-deep on the 1988 and 1993 teams. I told my dad, yup, that’s the decision. I was excited! I wanted to make my dad happy! Choosing a college would be a great relief, an end to the questions! So, heck yes I wanted to spend my first foray into adulthood in South Bend.
And then, three months later, I got into NU, I learned more about Medill and quality of the alumni network, and I drank on the landfill. I changed my mind, and nobody cared. (Well, my dad, who stopped loving me until my younger brother chose that certain catholic school, three years later.) And, while that conversation was tough, it was absolutely the best decision for me; I would have been miserable at my initial first choice, and I found a perfect fit at NU.
And again, nobody cared.
It reflects poorly on anyone here that we care so much. These are kids. They’re allowed to change their minds, especially when they’re locked into a system that offers severe penalties for changing their minds after February of their senior year. He had a 15-month window to change his mind, and he did.
Now, it’s possible that Millen “used” Northwestern, that he was always holding out for a better offer, and that he only considered NU a deep fallback option. That’d be a little greasy of him (but, frankly, given the rarity of P5 offers and the relative dearth of West Coast programs, not entirely indefensible.)
It’s also possible that Millen got swept up in the moment, and said something that he found himself regretting. He got to tell his dad he was following in his footsteps, a real-life D1 QB. He got to make Fitz and the staff happy. He got the relief of getting that decision out of the way, and of getting those reporters and those schools off his back. And then, over the last few months, he came to regret the decision.
Which would be worse: A decommitment now, when NU has almost a year to find a replacement, or a half-hearted enrollment in September, and a subsequent transfer following his freshman season, when he realized that, yes, he missed NFL games starting at 10 a.m. and , indeed, he preferred In N Out to anything, even Portillo’s.
Good for him. I hope he loses to NU in the 2022 National Championship game.