House rules are king in this game. What I do is
go this site and draw a 300-mile radius circle around the city my school is in. For instance, pretend I'm the coach at Colorado. I draw a 300-mile circle around Boulder, and any state that is touched by that circle is a state I can recruit. That means my recruiting states are: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and it clips part of Texas, but I ignore Texas/California/Florida, it just makes the recruiting too easy. So of the eight states that I'll recruit from, really only Colorado and Oklahoma have a decent number of recruits (more than 30, I think) and the rest are pretty barren. So that makes recruiting harder right away. I take the viewpoint of limiting where I can recruit over putting restrictions on prestige, though that is also a valid viewpoint as well.
I also employ a manual random improvement method inspired by
Hellisan on these boards. This assigns a work ethic for each player and that gets used to choose a random number within a range of numbers to improve the player by.
So, to walk through I use this, I include the average off-season improvement that happens in the game, which is about 4.5 points per player. So, a player with 65 work ethic is going to get a random improvement interval of -8 to 1 points.
So he ends the season as 70 overall. He gets to 75 with the normal offseason improvement. He rolls a -7 in my manual improvement which drops him to a 68 overall, worse than his overall last year. This allows more fluidity on my depth chart. The improvement are also randomly rolled in different categories like mental, physical, technique, etc.
I also lower my players injury ratings based as follows:
Offense:
QB (-10)
HB/FB (-15)
OLINE (-70)
Remainder of the offense: (-20)
Defense:
DL (-30)
LB (-40)
DB (-50)
I also take -15 stamina off all my players, lower my kickers accuracy and power. All of this is an attempt to rectify problems with the game: Kickers never miss when you use them, injuries don't occur for the user and players getting better at the exact same rate.
These recruiting and manual improvement allow me to add more randomness and restrictions on getting good too fast. I remove plays that I find myself relying on and I just recently switched to a 3-3-5 defense for the first time ever and I'm loving that challenge as well. Couple all that with
a great statistical tracking sheet and scheduling very hard and the dynasty gets resurrected into something far greater.