Introduction

I hope to within a few guides address how recruiting works in my favorite video game of all time, the NCAA Football Series by EA Sports. I have written before on http://www.ncaastrategies.com/ on the topic of recruiting, and wish to expand and update on it on my own blog.

I consider myself an expert in recruiting in this game series, not just because it’s the part of the game I continue to use the most, but I’ve actually with the help of others deciphered the game save file. Once it was deciphered, it allowed me to write several computer programs to anaylize the game itself.

This guides apply to NCAA 2005 – 2009, in particular the last gen (XP, PS2) versions. While, I’ve never played an XBOX360 or PS3 version of the game, so I am unable to verify if these recruiting tips still hold true. If I were to pick up the next gen game tomorrow, I would apply the same philosophies below to those versions.

In-Season Recruiting

You are given 12 scholarships up front to offer to a subset of the recruits who are available. This mode operates much differently than off-season recruiting, and I have spent little time investigating the save file for this feature because by following these steps below it is extremely easy to master.

You can get any player you want. The same is not true during the off-season recruiting. Pretty much after you pick your 12 guys to offer, the game puts you on the 8-team interested list. I believe that if you started a dynasty with 8 teams, and targeted the same guy on all 8 teams, he would only be interested in those 8 teams. So feel free to go after the big fish.

Do not target more than 5 players. I offer to 12 players (sometimes even less), and after the offers are sent out I check the interest of each recruit. I believe even if you are dead last on a player’s list, you can win him, but it will take more time. So I tend to pick the players are I am more interest in and assign them 20% of the points.

If you are building your team, target only 3 or 4. The 25% or 33% point offering to each player will greatly increase your chance of signing that player. If you are team is horrible and you need a stud QB, just target him and another guy. While it’s higher risk if he doesn’t sign, your odds are greatly increased.

Build pipelines. The amount of players interested in you during the off-season can be effected by your established pipelines. Plus it’s less of a point cost in off-season mode to recruit players from pipelines. So if you’re school is located in a talent deprived area, try recruiting your kids from FL, CA, or TX. You only need 3 players to establish a pipeline.

Invite as soon as possible. Check your recruiting status after the conclusion of each week. As soon as it is available to invite someone, do it AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. I can’t stress this enough, do not wait till the next big game. The majority of recruits will commit on their first visit, make sure that visit is to you! Plus, the sooner players commit, the sooner those points are available to you to use on someone else.

REFUSE ALL PROMISES. I’ll say it again, REFUSE ALL PROMISES. At very least, the PS2 version has a bug in it where promises continue on forever. The developers of the game never clear out the promise flag. So say a new recruit is player #1923 in the game’s database. When he graduates and you get a new kid on your team, he’ll take over spot #1923. Say he is a QB and the last guy was a MLB. Well guess what, he’s going to get pissed and leave if you don’t play him at MLB if you promised that to the first guy! I’ve never seen any negative impact by refusing a promise. Trust me, it’s not worth it, it will ruin your dynasty until you switch teams.

Winning the game at the invite matters. While these numbers are not scientific, I would say nearly 70% of recruits commit immediately after a win visit. That number drops way down to something like 30-40% for a loss. If they visit during a BYE, I believe the game counts it as a loss. Only invite to a BYE if you are in a pinch.

Be smart about your points. Say you are targeting 5 kids, giving them each 20% of your points. A single recruit asks for an invite in week 4, but you can’t have him at the school until week 7. Since you are now one of his 3 schools, I usually drop his points down to 5% and reallocate those points to another kid who hasn’t asked for an invite yet. Aslong as the recruit you scheduled for an invite isn’t visiting another school (you should check this each week before taking away his points) he is not going to commit anywhere.  Make sure you give him back to 20% of points during his visit.

What pitch should I offer? In-season recruiting has always been simple, but 2009 made it even easier by allowing you to use multiple pitches. It’s almost idiot proof now. Check with the recruit and see if you have any feedback on his interests. If you can eliminate just one pitch, you can give him each of the other pitches. If you play the game before 2009, this rule of thumb usually holds true: If it’s a 5 or 4 star, it’s most likely Coach Prestige or Program Prestige. Academic recruits are rare and just mixed in there. Location seems to be the favorite pitch of 3*,2*,1*. And coaching style seems to be just a little more popular the academics. Try eliminating the pitches and offer the most logical one.  Pitches matter a lot in off-season recruiting, but are very much toned down in in-season, so it is not life and death.

After a visit, he’s a soft verbal, now what? Show him the love, immediately. If you want him badly, and can spare the points in anyway you have to get him up over 50%. The higher the better. Your chance to sign him dwindles every week, because he’s more and more likely to take those other visits. Load him up with points right away and keep after him till he signs.

After a visit, he didn’t commit or even give me a soft verbal. This is pretty rare, but when it does happen you’ve pretty much failed. I hate to take away all the points but I usually put him down to 5% and consider him gone.

In conclusion, In-Season recruiting is great in my mind for taking horrible teams and turning them into something. I usually target one or two nice skill guys as a 1* program and have them lead my team for 4 years. This would be impossible in off-season recruiting. But when you build up a power house team, in-season recruiting can be a bad thing. When you target a 4* CB who says he’s the #3 CB in the nation, they mean he’s the #3 CB out of the in-season kids. When it comes off-season time he may be the #20th ranked CB and you have 10 guys better than him begging to go to your school. Way to waste a scholarship!

Budgets

There seems to be a lot of questions around budgets, so I’ll address them first. Now, I do not have the exact numbers here because it would take a lot of grunt work to figure them out, but I promise you, this is how it works. You can argue with me until the end of time and unless you are a developer at EA, I’m going to trust the following:

How should I do my percentages? Great question, and I’ll tell you but, before I make a recommendation you must understand this:

Recruiting Points are defined as Budget % multiplied by number of non-televised, regional televised, and nationally televised games. So what I’m saying here if you only won a single game for 3 years, one year non-televised, one year regional, one year nationally you’d receive a different amount of points each year. Obviously the nationally televised games are worth more, with the non-televised being worth less. If you were to go win less, you are granted a base number upon your %, but trust me it’s not much. So like in real life, those televised games mean something, try your damnest to win them.

Training results are directly tied to your coaching prestige. If you take a 1* coach and give 40% of points to training and compare that to a 5* coach’s training results you’d notice a HUGE difference. So factor this in when you are just starting out.

Discipline points are defined as, who the hell cares? This has always been a major shortcoming of the series and in disguist I’ve come up with a hack to take it out of the game. I may share it with you in a later article. But be warned it’s not sexy. I’m sure the points have something to do with the %, and maybe even wins and coach prestige but I’ve never cared to figure it out.

My Situational Recommendations:

A 1* – 2* Coach: You’re team probably needs all the talent it can get, so I set the discipline at 0%, recruiting at 65% and training at 35%. I figure I’ll be able to lessen my NCAA warning level back in future years when I am better, so I run a loose shop. Remember training gains will be minimal so don’t waste too much on this, but you need your upperclassmen to progress somewhat.

A 3* Coach: Start bringing this back down to earth, 60% r, 40% t, 0% discipline. If your warning level is too high take it out of recruiting.

A 4* Coach: Time to go heavy on the training, and factor in discipline: 45% r, 50% t, 5% d.

A 5* Coach: By the time you reach this, you probably will have trouble spending all of those recruiting points, especially if you had a great season. Check the number of open scholarships. If you don’t have many, consider doing this: 30% r, 65% t, 5% d.

Since the points are so heavily tied to wins, really think about how many points you’ll get before you do these budgets.

Transfers / Going Pro

This part also leads to frustration, because it lacks in realism. Some of these guys going pro you know wouldn’t do it in real life, and your stud player who should go pro doesn’t. Plus, I think more guys should leave before the SR (RS) year, because they are done with college. Hell, you should have the choice to bring them back or not.

All that aside, here are my own tip for this section. First, even though it says “Week 1 Points Remaining” it has NO impact on your recruiting, so feel free to spend these points as you wish. Make sure you leave nearly nothing left when you are almost done, but always leave enough to approach a kid again and try to talk him into it. The amount of points it costs to keep him differs from player depending on their home state, again fairly lame.

TO BE CONTINUED…..