Recruiting tips for veteran dynasty players

[kcarr]

Quote: Originally Posted by BigDuke

Thanks for confirming. I noticed there wasn't a x2 for a promise, but wasn't sure about the others. I've read that having 35 recruits on the board is bad for recruiting. Does anyone have hard proof about the negatives (or positives?) of having a full recruiting board? I don't see the point of having a 35 man capacity board if filling it negatively impacts my recruiting. Just because I have a guy on my board doesn't mean I'm actively recruiting him. How would other recruits even know who else was on my board? I want to fill my board with recruits I like, but may never call. Just to have them there as backups in case the guy I'm really going after doesn't sign with me. Otherwise, I have to go searching for them in the pool again if I remove them from my board.

The biggest positives of having the full board are it lets you keep an eye on some backup plan type recruits and it will keep you in better standing with those recruits you aren't calling.

The downside to it is every week you get one of the special bonuses, the 2x multiplier, the autocommit one, the unlock one, or the pink diamond that allows you to jump into a player's top 10. The 2x one and the unlock one go to 3 random players on your board and the autocommit one goes to 1 random player on your board who has you as their top school. Therefore if one of those 3, especially the 2x or the autocommit, comes up you want to make sure that you call those players and for the 2x one spend as much time with them as possible. If some of those 2xs or autocommits are going to players who are sitting 29th on your board who you aren't calling you will really be missing out on a huge chance to improve your standing with recruites you really want

[BigDuke]

Quote: Originally Posted by kcarr

The biggest positives of having the full board are it lets you keep an eye on some backup plan type recruits and it will keep you in better standing with those recruits you aren't calling. The downside to it is every week you get one of the special bonuses, the 2x multiplier, the autocommit one, the unlock one, or the pink diamond that allows you to jump into a player's top 10. The 2x one and the unlock one go to 3 random players on your board and the autocommit one goes to 1 random player on your board who has you as their top school. Therefore if one of those 3, especially the 2x or the autocommit, comes up you want to make sure that you call those players and for the 2x one spend as much time with them as possible. If some of those 2xs or autocommits are going to players who are sitting 29th on your board who you aren't calling you will really be missing out on a huge chance to improve your standing with recruites you really want

Thanks for shedding light on it. My primary concern was if I had 4 WRs on my board, would they not think as highly of me compared to having only 2 on my board. Even if I was only calling the 2 and just had the other 2 as a backup option.

One other note, the Auto-commit is not always there each week, unless I'm doing something wrong. There are times when I'll offer a scholarship to every recruit who has me #1 and most times I'll never get an auto-commit. I have gotten maybe 2 or 3 total.

[GGGswim]

Quote: Originally Posted by BigDuke

I've read that having 35 recruits on the board is bad for recruiting. Does anyone have hard proof about the negatives (or positives?) of having a full recruiting board? … I want to fill my board with recruits I like, but may never call. Just to have them there as backups in case the guy I'm really going after doesn't sign with me. Otherwise, I have to go searching for them in the pool again if I remove them from my board.

A WILDLY discussed and disputed topic here in threads.
Remember, you only get ONE of the bonuses (one Pink Diamond, three x2, three Unlock, or one insta-commit [though I read one post where a guy says he regulary gets 3-4 in 1st wk., NEVER seen more than 1 in my experiences]) per week. So if you have guys you're not calling, you could be losing those bonus opportunities to them while you wished they'd have come up on the guys you did call. IMO, I don't like those odds.

I'll offer that the most success I've had with recruiting -- keeping in mind I'm playing with a 6* SEC school, which does make a difference -- is with a 12-man board where I divy up my calls as 4x60min, 4x50 & 4x40, hope for one insta-commit ('cause I do get a lot of top-level talent listing me as #1 on their list), then move into a 5x60, 6x50 mode.
HOWEVER, I eventually found that after I got past my initial 12 (or 13 or 14, depending on any early commit and going back to pick up a recruit), that when I went back to the full recruit listing in, say, wk 7, that the guys that had me initially at #1 now have me 5th or 6th or worse and more than 600 points behind.
I switched 2 seasons ago to a board of 19 where I give the 'bottom' 10 guys 10 min. each after divying up the other 8 hrs, 20 min. on my top-9 recruits. You might get 1 insta-commit, and you usually lose one guy to an insta-commit to another school, but the idea is that I'm trying to string the 10 along hoping that I'll only lose enough(?) points to still have room to catch up with increased call time as guys from the top-9 commit. Therefore, it works best if the bottom-10 are pipeline and/or had you #1 at the start. Sometimes you get lucky with one of those guys and get a x2 on a pipeline guy and you're magically back in business. Other times, like this season, this fails a little as I missed out on two different HBs that I just couldn't make up the ground on.
It's all a balancing act as to how you want to handle the chances associated with ##s on your board.

[the veteran]

Exactly how I recruit GGGswim. I keep about 12-15 guys I focus 40-60mins on depending on how competitive the recruiting is with each. But then I have about 10 or so guys who are lower ranked but have me high on their boards I string along with 10-30mins a week. Sometimes another school will go hard at them and you will lose those guys but they are usually "bonus" recruits I don't necessarily need. The most important thing is landing your top 12. It is very competitive in my OD with a few 6 star programs going for the top players so you always have to be on your toes.

If you are in an OD it's always important to watch which recruits the top programs are going after. If you are lower rated sometimes it's better to cut your losses than to waste 60min a week going up against a top school.

[kcarr]

Quote: Originally Posted by BigDuke

Thanks for shedding light on it. My primary concern was if I had 4 WRs on my board, would they not think as highly of me compared to having only 2 on my board. Even if I was only calling the 2 and just had the other 2 as a backup option. One other note, the Auto-commit is not always there each week, unless I'm doing something wrong. There are times when I'll offer a scholarship to every recruit who has me #1 and most times I'll never get an auto-commit. I have gotten maybe 2 or 3 total.

Im not talking about the scholarship offer auto commit and no it isn't there every week. 1 of those 4 bonuses is there every week and the auto commit one will have the player commit as soon as you go into the call and will show a blue AF at the top left of the screen but it has to be a player who has your school #1. It is the rarest and also the most powerful of the 4 bonuses, weakest is the pink diamond one, followed by the unlock one, then the 2x 1 then the autocommit one. I ussually see the autocommit one on average once a year

[CenTechsan]

I'm in an online dynasty where all 12 users are in the same conference and we all started as 1* prestige teams NOT located in Texas, California, or Florida. So pretty much think of the most difficult school it would be to rebuild, and then put yourself in the same conference as 11 other humans who are trying to do the same thing.

Now in year 7 my Idaho Vandals are a 5* prestige team (Western Michigan is a 6* and just won the MNC). Last season I went 12-1 with a Rose Bowl win over Michigan.

So when it comes to recruiting, I think I've learned some pretty valuable tricks and I've had the top class in our dynasty a few times.

1. RATINGS-----

Don't get infatuated with stars and overall ratings. I've seen plenty of 3 and 4* prospects that I just got excited to be on their board come in and be absolute crap. Look at the pertinent ratings. The initial post in this thread shows you how to find players that will come in with high overall ratings. I say crap on that. Give me a free safety that has good speed and zone coverage over a higher rated safety with a better "overall."

Same with every position. Look at strength and block shedding for your d-linemen and inside backers. Know if you want to be a man or zone (predominantly) team, and find players that fit that. I've got a corner that is absolute lockdown at man but gets confused if I put him in a zone. I can put him in man and user the free safety to roam other parts of the field. Same goes for all positions. Take a deeper look into your depth chart and find the guys with the ratings that matter to you and your scheme.

When I look at QB's, I look at Accuracy, awareness, and throwing power in that order. That's it. I've found 3* qb's that have played (for my system) much better than 4* guys. My first 4* recruit was a quarterback that I was enamored with because he was the first 4* taken by anybody in my OD. He's 5'6 and he sucks. I want my 3* back that I had last year. His balls get batted down all the time and anytime he gets hit he sits out the next few plays.


2. Targeting ----(Find the dreamers!)

When you're building a program from scratch, the absolute first thing you need to do is find bodies. I think I got a good jump on a lot of the other users in my dynasty because they were conditioned (thanks to years of NCAA past) to not even look at a recruit that wasn't at least a 3*. Recruiting is much harder in this season, and while I was nabbing a class full of 2* and 1* players that I hand picked according to their ratings, my conference brethren were wasting their best (C) pitches on 4* and 3* recruits they had no chance of getting. So when it's week 9 and they haven't made any headway with anybody on their board, they come calling on the 2*s and are now losing recruits to Bowling Green and Tulane because those schools have been recruiting them all season. So most schools in my OD had to take plenty of walk-ons or desperation 1* players in the offseason.

After I prestiged up (wait.....this is NCAA not CoD), I started to build a foundation of 3* players. One thing that I think helped me out a TON when landing 3*s was to look at other school on their "Top Schools" list. If I saw a 3* recruit who had me as #6 but his first 5 schools were USC, Texas, Florida, Ohio State, etc, I knew I had a damn good chance to get him because those schools wouldn't be interested in him until the end of the season if at all. By the same token, if I saw that I was #2 or #3 on a recruit's board, but the team ahead of me was a lower-caliber team like Cal or Minnesota, I'd be very cautious of spending too much time, and after week 1, if they had offers from those other schools, I dropped them and found another 3* with his head in the clouds. Those are the 3*s that a 2* school like Idaho could score without starting out high on a board.

RECRUITING BOARD SIZE --------

There are positives and negatives to having a small board or a big board. I try to keep it as small as I can to take full advantage of the X2 bonus. Those things are gold. A few days ago I was sitting -200 points on a stud 4* linebacker from Texas who had A&M as his top school. A 60 minute X2 call netted me almost 800 points and I jumped to a 200 pt lead on A&M. Yesterday he instant-committed to me. Score. Also make sure to call every recruit that has you as his #1 every week, to make sure you don't ever miss out on that insta-commit bonus, even if it's just a 10 minute call.

But there's certainly a time to have a big board. Sometimes you just have a lot of needs and need to keep tabs on a lot of kids. Target your best ones first so that if you get a X2, you will use it on a top prospect.

MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR MINUTES-------------

This is probably too time consuming for most, but when I've been really desperate (24 seniors leaving and had a crapton of holes to fill) I've skipped the "find interest" choice altogether. I just make a list of my recruits on paper, and write down the points I get for pitching. The next time I call them, I can see on my paper which pitches worked well and which ones didn't. Not nearly as convenient as having the game keep track of it for you, but you do get more points for pitching than finding interest.



Hope this helps. Good luck to my fellow program builders. It's the best experience in the game and those that start off with the power teams will never know the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that come from seeing a sister of the poor rise to the top and become a force on the CFB scene.

[the veteran]

Quote: Originally Posted by CenTechsan

Also make sure to call every recruit that has you as his #1 every week, to make sure you don't ever miss out on that insta-commit bonus, even if it's just a 10 minute call.

Really good advice I never considered. When I am #1 and get a big lead on other schools I tend to slack on those guys but I will give them at least 10 minutes now.

It feels good to go from a 2* team to a 6* in an OD, great sense of accomplishment

[kcarr]

Here is my strategy for the size of board to use. In the preseason I will choose 8 players who I really want. 1st here I look for position of need that and then for other players who can really improve my overall roster talent by bringing some skill that I could use. I plan to chase these guys really hard so I stick to players I have a chance at but am also willing to take some chances where my chance is small. With a 1 or 2 star school these will be either good 2 star players or will be 3 star players. As your team gets better these will be higher rated players. The one main requirement is these are all players who do not have me #1 on their list.

I then choose 12 players who have me at the very top of their list. If there are less than 12 I will add another to the 1st group and if there are less than 6 then another beyond that. As a 1 star you may not have 12 players here but as a 2 star of higher you usually should from what I have seen. I will take the best of the players with me at the top of their list first but will take about anyone to fill out the list. These guys are at the very least roster fillers and remember a 1*, especially a good 1* is better than a walkon and if they arent good enough you can always cut them.

The 1st week I will make a 10 minute call to the 12 who have me 1st on their list. During this call I will offer a scholarship. Usually between 3 and 6 of these guys will commit that 1st week any given year. That gives you a quick jump on getting some talent to avoid settling for walkons.

The top 8 I will call for a full 60 minutes and will not offer a scholarship to. I am not top on their list so can't get an instant commit but I will try to move to that point.

Week 2 I will go through and make sure anyone who I have offered to that noone else has (these should only be players I am at the top with) are at the bottom of my list. They get 10 minute calls every week until either they sign or someone else gives them an offer. If you are a lower rated school then these will be a lot of 1 or 2 star players who won't be recruited by others so you can get them with 10 minute calls every week and they will be a cheap boost to your roster. Also, I will look through the top 8 and see if I moved up to the top of anyones list. If I have and noone else offered them a scholarship they will get a 10 minute call and an offer for me and get moved down to the 10 minute per week group. I will also do a quick search for people who have my at the top of their list against to see if there are any that I want. If there are any more that can help me I will give them a 10 minute offer and add them to that group.

After all those 10 minute calls I will look at how much time I have left. Should be around 8 hours, maybe more. I will then keep as many of the remaining players as I can give 1 hour calls to and if I have any minutes left over keep 1 more to use those up. Giving these players a full hour gives you the best chance to get those players and I usually get all but maybe 1 or 2.

I continue like that giving 60 minute calls to the 1st group and 10 minute calls to the second group each week. When someone signs and that opens up minutes for me to use I then add another playerto the group until I reach the point where I have 25 players on my board between committed players and guys I am chasing. At this point I will start adding extra minutes to the 10 minute group to use up my minutes but basically I get 23-25 guys every year and generally improve the talent level of my team every year either in terms of overall or at least in terms of what I can do with my team.