Assistant coaches are the lifeblood of a program. They put in long hours, travel thousands of miles, initiate contact with recruits and evaluate and decide which players to go after. The addition of these coaches in the Dynasty mode of EA Sports' NCAA Football 11 could add so much more to the complexity of recruiting and evaluating players.

The head coach, in most cases, does not initiate phone calls and schedule visits with recruits. The head coach is more focused on the actual games at hand during the season, as evidenced by Bruce Feldman's fantastic book, Meat Market, which follows Ed Orgeron (head coach at Ole Miss at the time) and his staff during a complete recruiting cycle, from evaluations to signings. This book paints a clear picture of what college football recruiting is actually like, and EA Sports' version of recruiting is nothing like the real thing.

In NCAA Football 11, you are handed a complete list of players at the beginning of every season who are ranked in order of their caliber, and in most cases, overall rating. While this is a nice tool that gives you a general idea of who the best players are to recruit, most coaches do not even think about recruiting based off a National Top 100 list made by a media Web site.

A head coach sits down with his assistants and they then watch a massive amount of tape on different prospects. They then compile a list of players that they would like to recruit, and they then initially offer scholarships to their top targets and begin the recruiting process. However, the head coach very rarely actually talks to these players until it's further along in the recruiting process -- most contact from the head coach is initiated before, during and after the official visit.

The addition of assistant coaches could add a wide variety of fun and entertainment while also creating a more dynamic recruiting experience. First off, the recruiting time could greatly be reduced. You could assign different recruiting tactics and assignments to different assistant coaches, and the hassle of going through and specifically pitching topics to recruits could be eliminated or, at the very least, be much less time consuming. A simple e-mail each week reporting the results of pitches and time spent on a recruit could allow the user to adjust the pitches and time spent on a recruit as they see fit.

Now, I am not saying that EA Sports should not allow the user to personally contact recruits, but if the developers are looking for realism, it should at least be an option to have your assistants help you. And the extra caveat to the system would be that the amount of help would be based on the quality of your coaches. Simply put, I know a lot of people that love to play Dynasty mode, but they only do so because they like to play the games. Generally speaking, they think recruiting is too time consuming. Why not cater to both groups?

Second, assistant coaches do more than just recruit players. They are also essential to game planning and in-game adjustments. Let's say a specific coach has a grade in four separate ratings. In this case, let's use offensive knowledge, defensive knowledge, special-teams knowledge and recruiting prowess. If you are looking to develop a five-star quarterback that you just signed, bringing in a more offensively knowledgeable coach would allow that player to develop to his full potential. For example, bringing in someone who is primarily a recruiting coach to be your offensive coordinator would increase the risk of turning your just-signed quarterback into the next Ryan Perrilloux or Kyle Wright.

Since assistant coaches and the head coach sit down and evaluate prospects by themselves -- and compile their own lists of rankings and targets -- you could allow the user to find more hidden gems and busts during the recruitment process by going this route. If your staff was better at evaluating players, your rankings would be more accurate and you would be able to find players that may not have been as good or bad as their national rankings originally indicated. A prime example of this is the recently graduated Texas alum and Cleveland Browns draft pick Colt McCoy. He was a three-star prospect according to the popular recruiting Web site Rivals.com, but the Texas staff trusted their evaluations and chose him to start over the more highly recruited quarterback, Jevan Snead out of the state of Florida.

In real life, if coordinators have success, they either move on to a bigger job in a bigger conference or become a head coach at a level similar to the one that they are already in. This should be no different in the game. In an offseason mode that has become extremely stale, the hiring (and firing), promoting and courting of assistant coaches could be one of the main tasks presented to the user. The higher prestige schools would obviously have more money to spend on assistants, but a tug-of-war sliding budget (similar to NCAA Football 2004) that involves money distributed for assistant coaches salaries, recruiting hours, disciplinary budget and an academic budget would give users the feeling of a tighter grasp on their program, and in turn, a more in-depth experience within the Dynasty mode.