These are questions for the coaches once they are showing interest. You might miss this year’s ED window at some schools. Some D3s each year, even the highly rejective ones, have some recruited athletes applying thru the RD round. It just depends. Football is one of the sports where it’s not uncommon for some recruits to go thru the RD process because they missed the ED window.
If a D3 coach has serious interest, they will typically do an academic pre-read with admissions, where they submit the athlete’s transcript, test scores, and resume to an AO.
If that is positive, the next step would be for the coach to make a verbal offer to the student for support thru the admissions process. Coaches typically send more athletes thru pre-reads than they have full support slots. Most D3 recruits apply ED, that’s the quid for coach support. Many 2024 football commitments have already been made, but not all as I noted above.
Recruits nearly always have to fully complete the application….essays (good ones), letters of rec, as required by each school.
D1 and D2 recruiting is generally different than D3.