Essential Tips For Recruiting the Best Players

Anyone who follows college football knows success on the field lives and dies by the quality of players you have. That’s where recruiting comes into play. If you want the best players to commit to coming to your school in EA Sports College Football 25 then you need to be a master recorder.

Getting Started

Attracting the best players starts before you get to recruiting. When you create your coach you get to choose a talent tree to develop. The recruiting tree is extremely influential, giving big bonuses to your ability to get players to commit to your school, and how many recruiting activities you can complete in that process. Successful recruiting gives you XP which you can then use to unlock helpful abilities like improved scouting, and bonuses to influence.

The school that you coach at also makes a big difference. 5-star prestige Powerhouse colleges like Alabama will have an easier time convincing highly talented four- and five-star recruits to join the team, while smaller one and two-star programs like Oregon State will take more work, and in many cases, the best prospects in the country simply won’t be interested at all.

Targeting Prospects

The first thing you will need to do is identify which players to target for recruiting. You can have up to 35 prospects in your pipeline. We recommend filling all 35 spots, though if you find that overwhelming you can focus on a smaller group.

When selecting those prospects there are a few things you should focus on. As you look at these, start with five-star recruits and work down, that way you are committing your limited spaces and resources to the best players. That will be true throughout the entire recruiting process.

You can also look at pipeline strength. This number affects how much progress you make with that player with every recruiting action. The higher the number, the easier it will be to get that player.

For the first week, or week 0, we are going to start simple.

• First, look at school preferences. Anyone who has an immediate interest in your program is worth exploring further, and will likely be someone you can sign with less effort than similar players who haven’t yet considered your team. You can sort by interest level, or use Recommended View, which does a good job of surfacing these players.

• Then, as you start filling your prospects list, you'll want to account for areas of need. If you have two all-american quality freshmen holding down your running back position you may be better off focusing on your wideouts, or defense. It’s ok to build your list, filter out some players, and then go back over it again to fill it up again based on need.

Once you have your initial list, advance the week to start the recruitment battle.

Weekly Recruiting

The first thing to look at is which players have scholarship offers. The more offers a player has the harder it will be to make your team stand out, especially if you are a small school. If you aren’t listed among the top schools for a prospect, and they have a number of scholarship offers, now is a good time to remove them from your board.

Conversely, any players you find with no scholarship offers, even if you aren’t listed as a school that they are interested in, should be added to fill your board back up.

Once you know who you want on your team, it’s time to start getting them to commit to your program. The first thing to do is decide who you want to offer a scholarship. This gives you a chance to have players sign with you right away and will increase their interest in coming to your school. You could make an offer to all 35 of your prospects if you want, though if you are a smaller school it may make more sense to be selective.

The best targets initially are going to be players who don’t have other offers, indicated by no paper icon by a school, or have a strong interest in playing for your team. You can manually cancel scholarship offers, or they will be canceled and returned to you anytime you remove a player from your board, or they sign with another school.

You have a finite amount of time each week to spend with each prospect, and recruiting overall. The amount of time you have varies by your school's prestige and can be increased with some coaching upgrades. Initially, your best time investment is to just Send the House at your top targets. This gives you the most bang for your buck in recruiting.

It also reveals more about what their priorities are in a potential school. Use this opportunity to see how each player's preferences compare to what your team has to offer. Every school has different strengths and weaknesses. If you see a good recruit who cares about Academic Prestige, for example, and you are more of a party school, that’s a good sign that you will have an uphill battle getting them on your team. Conversely, if they want to be close to home and you just happen to be in their home state, you’ve got a clear positive influence to lean on.

Over time the prospective players will whittle down their potential choices. Your goal is to stay above the cutoff line. If you drop below it, you will irrevocably be eliminated as a potential destination.

Once the recruit has narrowed the field down to their top five teams, the Hard and Soft Sell recruiting actions open up. This lets you tailor your messaging to the areas where the player's priorities, indicated with green check marks, and your school's strengths align. Your goal is to select a pitch that aligns the player’s interests with areas where your team is well-graded.

The top five teams also get an opportunity to arrange a Visit. When you do this you get a choice of which upcoming game to highlight, and which facets of your school to feature.

Which game you choose has some risk/reward to it. An easy game won’t impress a potential player much, but they will be very unhappy if you lose. Likewise, taking on a juggernaut program and getting beat hurts your standings little, but a win can do a lot to make you look good.

Continue this process each week, and keep updating your Recruiting Board with new players as you go. Look to see which players you have a large recruiting lead on and remove your current scouting action so that you can apply it elsewhere, and start building goodwill with another prospect. If other teams start to catch up you can always reallocate resources back that way.

If you aren’t sure where to utilize time, you can always use some to scout a player, and reveal their attributes, which can help you prioritize who to target. If you fully scout a player you will also uncover busts and gems. Busts are the equivalent of a player one star lower. Gems, meanwhile, are as good as players rated one-star tier higher.

Continue this churn every week, and before long you will have an all-star class of recruits. If you are a lower prestige school you can even increase your star rating over time with winning seasons, which will improve your recruiting ability.

Check out these other helpful College Football 25 guides next:

• Reading Defensive Coverages
• Physical Abilities
• Mental Abilities