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Find out more about Daniel: A gamer since the days of the Atari 2600, Daniel began programming his own games on his Vic 20 and has always been interested in the nuts and bolts supporting the game. Daniel is based out of Dallas, TX. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Daniel. |
There are many aspects for building a powerhouse college football team, and solid recruiting is one of the primary building blocks. Like real college football, recruiting in NCAA Football 09 requires you to swoon players over the phone, show them why your school is best by getting them to come and visit, and finally sitting down in their home to go over everything with their family.
In the NCAA Football 09 recruiting strategy guide, we will discuss the fundamentals of good recruiting including good strategies to use with powerhouses and what weaker schools can do to compete with the big boys.
The first step in recruiting is picking the right players. By using the database search tool, you can narrow down potential recruits by position, location, caliber, interest level and a number of other qualities. When making the initial list, you will mainly be interested in position, location and caliber. For larger schools, location is not much of a factor, but smaller schools will find that recruits coming from their own state will be much easier to sign.
The position of a recruit on the recruiting board is also important, so after picking out thirty-five solid prospects, you will wan to go over the recruiting board to make sure everything looks okay. The further down the list a prospect is, the less happy he will be about it, so make sure the prospects you are most interested in signing are at the top.
Once the season starts, you will have 10 hours per week to place phone calls, schedule visits and offer scholarships. The phone call is the most important aspect of this phase, and it is also the most time-consuming. You will want to learn to manage the art of the phone call in order to get to as many prospects as possible in a given week.
Find Pitch. This is the 'fishing' part of recruiting where you hoping to find out what the recruit is interested in. You'll want to concentrate on things your school is at least "Good" at -- stating with those aspects rated "Elite" and working your way down. Don't both with categories where you score a "Sub Par" or "Fair" ranking -- after all, you don't want to pitch them that you are a pro factory if you are sub par at being a pro factory!
Hard Sell Pitch. While you are given the opportunity to hard sell a recruit even if their pitch importance is unknown, you should always unlock a pitch before hard selling it. Generally, you will only want to hard sell pitches where the interest level is "high" or above -- but if you are elite at something, hard selling a recruit who has an above average interest is okay too.
Sway Pitch. This is perhaps the most important thing you can do during recruiting and -- unfortunately -- it is also probably the most neglected. A careful use of sway pitch can be the difference between a four-star recruit going to a cupcake school or being swept away by a competing powerhouse. Obviously, you only want to use sway pitch on categories that your school is good at. You should always feel safe trying to sway the pitch of someone whose interest is low or average. Once they get to above average, there's a chance that trying to sway them will actually have the opposite effect -- but sometimes you may need to take a gamble to get a recruit. You should avoid trying to sway someone who already has high interest in that category.
Keep the Phone Call Simple. You should limit yourself to unlocking only 2-3 pitches and swaying only one pitch per phone call. If you spend too much time with one recruit, you may not make it far down your list. You don't have to make it through all 35 recruits every week, but you should always make it through at least 15-20. In early weeks, concentrate on unlocking pitches and hard selling what they like. After you have everything unlocked that your school is good at, you can begin using some time trying to sway their interest level.
Always Leave Them Smiling. The most important thing you can do during a phone call is to leave them happy. So, if you try to sway their interest in a subject and it just makes them mad, try to hard sell them on something they are really interested in before hanging up the phone.
Scholarships. When to offer a scholarship is a matter of strategy. You can offer scholarships in the first week or two of the schedule in order to build up some quick interest in a team in hopes of using that interest to outrace the competition. Or, you could rely on hard selling pitches in hopes that they will immediately accept a scholarship once offered. You should only offer a scholarship using this strategy if the player's interest in your team completely fills up the bar. This is a good strategy because it eliminates the competition during offseason recruiting, but a recruit will not always commit to your team. The best strategy for scholarships is using a mixture of the two -- offer scholarships quickly to those recruits that don't seem as interested in your team, and hold back on those recruits who do show immediate interest.
The Visit. The visit is the single most important event for recruiting. The best visits are those held late in the season against ranked teams or against rivals. But that doesn't mean you should always hold visits during those weeks -- winning the game during a recruit's visit is as important as who you play. So, having everyone show up to that showdown with the #1 ranked team means you'll be putting all your recruiting eggs in one basket. So spread some of the visits out, but make sure you schedule visits with your most sought-after recruits for later in the season.
If you haven't signed anyone when the end of the season comes, don't worry. Most of the heavy lifting of the recruiting season happens after the football stops. You'll have five more weeks to convince recruits to sign with your team, and you'll find that many recruits wait until the last moment to sign.
Recruiting in the offseason is the same as recruiting during the season with one main difference: promises.
Promises allow you to sway that recruit who isn't so much interested in your school as well as push that recruit who is almost ready to sign over the edge. Not all promises are available when you just begin your dynasty -- you will have to fulfill promises to other players before those will open up.
Some promises are easy to keep -- like the promise to not redshirt the player -- and others are a bit more difficult -- like the promise to win the national championship in their first year. Remember, it is very important to keep the promise, so be reasonable.
Breaking a promise not only means your coach integrity will go down (so you won't open up new promises and players won't be as swayed by your promises), it also increases the chances the player will choose to transfer out of your college at the end of the season.
Good promises to make for a budding dynasty are the promise to not redshirt the player and the promise of solid starting time -- if, of course, you know the recruit will be the starter.
The basic strategy you will use in recruiting will depend a lot on your school. A powerhouse team will go about recruiting in a far different way than a cupcake school. And effective recruiting will lead to your school becoming that powerhouse team, so it is important to get it right as quickly as possible.
Who should I recruit?
Some of the most important decisions in recruiting are made before the first phone call is made. Who to target in your recruiting is often just as important as how you go about it.
Even one star teams have a chance at great players, so the first key is to not sell yourself short. If you are a one star team, you should still be going after at least a dozen 4 star players and even (perhaps) a five star. If you are a two star team, you should be going after 15-20 four star players, and if you are three star or above, most of your initial recruiting roster should be filled with four star players.
Should you totally ignore two and three star recruits? No. The only recruits you should totally ignore are one star recruits who aren't much better than a walk on. As you go through the season, you will notice some recruits becoming extremely interested in other schools and not at all interested in yours. These recruits should be dropped in favor of new recruits -- and as the season goes on, you should concentrate more on three and two star recruits to fill the remainder of your board.
When should I drop a recruit?
Two factors come in to play when deciding whether or not to stop recruiting a player. First is their interest level in those categories that your team is good at. If they have a low interest in everything you are good at, you will want to drop them even if they haven't shown interest in another team. On the other hand, if they have filled up the interest level with another team with 80% or more of the bar filled, you may want to drop them even if they are very interested in what you are good at.
Learning when to drop a recruit is part of the art of recruiting, so don't worry about it if you don't get it right the first time. As you gain experience recruiting, you will learn when a recruit has reached the point when you know they just aren't going to sign with you.
I dropped the recruit. Who do I replace him with?
In early weeks, you will want to replace recruits in the same way you initially chose recruits -- using the prospect database to search for high caliber recruits at positions that you need filled.
After the first quarter of the season, you should start searching recruits whose commitment status is "10 schools remaining." This means they haven't shown much interest in any one school, so you still have a good chance at winning their hearts.
After the first half of the season, you might start finding the number of three and four star recruits who have 10 schools remaining wearing thin at positions you need filled. This is a good time to drop down to two star recruits -- though four and five star teams will rarely want to ever go for a two star recruit.
One other thing to keep in mind is that sometimes a two star recruit really can contribute to the best teams. Kick and punt returners don't have to be the greatest players to contribute -- speed and good enough hands to field those kicks are the two main things here. So, recruiting that 4.20 speed two star receiver can pay off even if you are Texas, Oklahoma, LSU or USC.
What about the recruiting board?
Managing the recruiting board is also another important aspect, especially for smaller schools. A powerhouse can rest assured that most recruits will like something they are good at and recruiting becomes more a matter of finding out what that is as opposed to finding out if they will be interested at all.
For a smaller school, the first two weeks should be devoted to finding out what the recruits are interested in. After that, it is a good idea to move recruits who are highly interested in two or more things you are good at to the top of the board, those who are highly interested in only one thing next, and those not highly interested in anything go last. Remember, if you've unlocked every category that your school is good at and the recruit is not interested in any of them, it is time to drop them. But -- and this is a big but -- you can always attempt to sway a recruit from 'average' to 'above average' and from 'above average' to 'high'. Just beware that spending too much time on one recruit can come back to haunt you in the end.
Another thing to keep in mind is to keep the same caliber of recruits next to each other. So if you are arranging based on those interest levels described above, you will want to sort the four caliber recruits first, three caliber next, etc.
But don't let these rules become hardcoded! If you have a 4.16 three star receiver that is very interested in your school, feel free to pop them into your top ten. Doing this will raise your chances of gaining the recruit and give you a safety net. This should be reserved for those coveted three star recruits, but don't be afraid to boost a couple of them into the four star crowd.
What about five star recruits? I always have at least one of them on my board when I start. When I'm a four star school, I put a few of them on there, and when I'm a powerhouse, I might put a half dozen or so. It's okay to go for these guys, but don't break the bank on them. They are the hardest to sign and often aren't that much better than a four star player.
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