Hey everyone, it's time for a little strategy session during this edition of Dynasty Musings. We’ll be talking about recruiting in NCAA Football 11 by EA Sports.

With the roulette feature that EA has added this year, you no longer just get to pound the same topics over and over again. A much needed addition, the roulette requires you to pick your spots wisely because you might not get to talk about your A-plus pro potential as much as you’d like. I’ll go over a few tips, and hopefully you guys chime in with some helpful tidbits as well in the comments.

This is easily the most important piece of advice for recruiting in this year’s installment of NCAA 11. I’ve found it extremely difficult to actually fill 25 scholarships, especially on the higher levels of recruiting difficulty. Start your initial search of prospects with the filter of being in the recruit’s top three choices to start. It’s very hard to jump schools, especially at the more national level where most of the pitch levels are the same.

After you get a good, solid list of about 12-18 kids, then move to top five and take the best couple of players to work on gradually. If you are ever 300-plus points behind the top school, it’s probably time to move on. The computer seems to do a very good job of holding ground at the top, at least at the higher difficulties, so making up such a huge difference can be time consuming.

If you ever find yourself better than a school at anything, regardless of what your rating is, don’t hesitate to compare. Every single point matters, and comparing your B playing time to another school’s C playing time is a big help. For example, if you hard sell your B playing time, you’re probably only going to get 40-75 points, and 75 is even stretching it. By comparing, you get the same amount of points, and you also subtract from the other school's total.

So getting plus-50 for you and minus-40 for a rival school is just like making a hard sell that gets you plus-90. The same goes if you have an A-plus and the other school has an A. The difference between the hard sell and the compare is not great enough to justify just hard selling. If the option is there, I would definitely recommend throwing in at least one to two compares a week to a prospect.

You’d be amazed by how many people I talk to that only recruit by caliber and never look at the player attributes that are given to them. This matters the most when you are trying to recruit a quarterback. Generally, in my experience, the four-star quarterbacks are better than the five-star quarterbacks -- not in terms of rating, but in the core categories (speed, acceleration, agility, throw power, throw accuracy).

This is not the case if you want to simulate most of the games since the five-star guys usually have more awareness (which we all know as the most important rating when simulating). A lot of the times, this is the case for wide receivers as well. The five-star wideouts seem to sacrifice some speed and acceleration for awareness.

This one seems more like common sense to me, but again, from what I’ve read, a lot of people don’t even find the pitches. They hard sell every week and try to remember what the recruit has liked in the past. When I start to recruit a player, the first two or three calls are basically all about finding pitches -- unless I suck at something, then I’ll use my scholarship offer. That way, when the recruit comes to visit, I have most of his pitches unlocked, and I can get the most out of the campus arrival.

Later in the game, when you get into the season, finding the pitches can actually make the quick calls useful. The computer does a pretty good job of recruiting with quick call once all of the pitches are found. Another option is to never find the pitch. Instead, you simply write down manually what the recruit’s response was, but most people don’t have the time to do that.

Quality over quantity – It’s more efficient to give the maximum time to 10 prospects than to give 20 prospects half an hour each. You also have a better chance of getting 60 minutes when you get the all-important times-two call. Getting kids to commit means you no longer have to call them, which leaves time for the rest of the prospects on the board.

Quick call kids you have a huge lead on – 20 minutes for kids you have a 200-plus point lead on should be a general rule of thumb, especially if you are the prospect’s only scholarship offer. No one’s catching you unless you stop calling the kid. Use that extra time for the true recruiting battles.

Cut your losses – If you put 60 minutes into a kid down 300 points, and you come back the next week and see you’re 250 points behind, it’s pretty clear that the computer is putting the prospect as a high priority. If you notice this type of trend, you just have to move on. You’re in all likelihood never going to pass that school.

Take off the computer-assisted recruiting board option - It will just annoy you to no end, trust me.

Use the scholarship offer as early as you can – Ideally, you will want to use the scholarship offer during the first 60 minute call. Use the offer when you get to a topic that is not the greatest for you. It’s always better to offer early and get that boost to stay in the hunt. Waiting to offer the scholarship always seems to be less efficient in the long run.

Fill your positions of need first – If you need two middle linebackers and you only have two seniors at that position on your roster, you need to make that position your highest priority. You don’t want to get stuck with a walk on or have to use a guy that’s out of position. This is true for every position except offensive line, where everyone is pretty much the same rating at all three offensive line positions.

Read the depth chart carefully - The computer may not tell you if you need a kid, but the depth chart definitely will. This is most evident when you only have three juniors at a position and no freshmen. You don’t generally want freshmen starting unless they are clearly better than your upperclassmen. Prepare two years ahead, not just one.


That will wrap it up for this week. I’d love to hear what you guys think of the article, or if you have tips of your own that you’d like to share.