If I've got a guy I'm all in on should I go ahead and offer in August if there's mutual interest or wait until we get closer to home visits in September? Is there any sort of built in "bonus" for having an offer out there each week?

I do all of my offers on 8/21. If I get rejected I offer to someone else immediately.

Offer as early as possible. I usually have offered early august

This isn't scientific, by any means, but I tend to wait as long as possible on guys that I know will have interest in my school until the end. And for a "reach" recruit, I tend to offer early so I can even get in the door for a home visit, where hopefully I can seal the deal.

I usually wait until late August or early September. I really like to see a note about a players personality before offering. If there is a really good player with warm interest and an okay or good attitude, I sometimes offer in early August.

From my digging, offering a scholarship itself doesn't have any impact on a recruit's interest in your school (NOTE: revoking a scholarship offer however will negatively impact the interest a rather larger amount). When recruiting updates are being processed every week, each recruit has a chance to commit to one of their Top 10 schools that have offered them a scholarship. But for that to even be considered, the recruit's interest has to be high enough. This "minimum threshold for consideration" starts high at the beginning of the season but continues to decline as certain dates are met when the season progresses.

The level of required interest is at least Hot (as Hot is about 80% towards the minimum threshold whatever it may be at that point in the season). Once the interest threshold has been exceeded for a given school in the Top 10, a check is made against the 1st Assistant Coach's Recruiting level. These levels are on a scale from 1-100 (like when you are building your custom coach when starting an Association). So if your 1st assistant coach has a Recruiting score of 80, that basically means the recruit has an 80% chance weekly of committing verbally once that minimum threshold has been exceeded.

So as others have mentioned, the challenge is the risk-and-reward of whether you want to wait to learn more about the player and risk losing them to a team that is actively recruiting them and has offered a scholarship, or to offer them a scholarship just in case but risk finding a better player as recruiting progresses.