Will college football's signing day ever be the same?

The NCAA’s first-ever college football early signing period begins Wednesday and I, for one, am nervous.

Not for the players who will sign binding (and legally lopsided) letters of intent to colleges in December, some seven weeks before the traditional February National Signing Day. There are plusses and minuses for both players and programs in the early period. That isn’t my concern here.

This is selfish, but what happens to a unique event that millions of us loved, sometimes proudly, sometimes sheepishly, sometimes secretly? What happens to those of us who saw the first Wednesday in February not as some forgettable winter morning, but a de facto national holiday?

No one knows how having two national signing days will change things.

Will we get twice the fun? Or none of it. Will it all be anticlimactic? Will we lose this compact window of engrossing, off-season nonsense?

I loved college football’s National Signing Day. Loved it all.

People with better taste, more refinement and higher intelligence could lecture how it represented the downfall of sport and society. I just enjoyed the mostly harmless entertainment such as when all the Stanford recruits began revealing their choice by donning dark-rimmed nerd glasses.

I loved the announcement featuring a table full of logo’d hats, knowing an equal number of millionaire coaches were watching, hanging on every reach and pull of a teenager who might not even pan out.

I loved the T-shirt fake outs, the unzipping of a jacket to reveal one school’s gear, only to stand up, peel that one off, and show another. Sometimes you could see it coming, “Wait, I know he’s wearing Texas burnt orange, but is that Oklahoma maroon under there?”