NCAA Football 13 Recruiting Guide Part 1

Part 1: Filling the preseason recruiting board



     The most important step in any successful recruiting program is selecting the right prospects.  The following guide is a synopsis of how I do things.  I play in an online dynasty and I tend to end up at or very near the top of the recruiting rankings every year so I know that this system works.

     The first task is to fill your recruiting board.  Nothing is more important than addressing your team needs on a year to year basis.  You do not want to end up starting a walk on after all.  I review team needs and always begin there.  So, lets say hypothetically you need 1 WR, 2 MLB, and 1 K.  I then use the search and add feature to select the position WR and require that their interest toward my school be at least in the top 10.  I do not bother trying to recruit players outside a top 10 interest because I think it is a waste of time.  You may land someone eventually but the effort required I believe is better spent elsewhere.  The only exception to this rule is when you have no one interested in your school at that position.  This seems to happen most frequently with the FB position, but your mileage may vary.

     Once you have searched for your WR, I always select the very best WR according to the rankings that have a top 10 interest.  I do this even if there is a guy below with a higher interest level.  This is probably just my retentive tendencies but I want to get the best guy that is interested.  I usually only do a 1 to 1 ration on team needs.  If I need a WR, then I only target one WR at the outset.  This may not hold true later after I have addressed team needs and begin to flesh out the rest of my recruit board but for starters, that is what I do.  Now, what about as I alluded to earlier if you do not have a WR with top 10 interest.  Then I drop the top 10 requirement from the search and just select the best WR in the country.  If you have to dream, dream big.  Having said this, if you do want to improve your chances somewhat of landing a player that does not have a top 10 interest in your school you could restrict your search to pipeline states and select the best player from that list.  Pipeline players always give you a better return on your recruiting time.  Repeat this process until all of your team needs have been addressed.  In the previous example, 1 WR, 2 MLB, and 1 K, this would mean that my board should have 4 players on it.  They would be 1 WR, 2 MLB and 1 K.  Great, we are ready to move on.

     The next step is to fill the remaining slots of our recruiting board.  If we continue to use the above example then this would mean that we would need to target an additional 31 players.  My system from here is very difficult (note sarcasm).  I again go into search and this time select any position with a top 10 interest.  From here I just go on down the list ordered by ranking and add every single player.  The only time I have deviated from this in the past is if I end up targeting 10 or so WR (I have had this happen) in which case I would simply begin to ignore WR but continue adding other positions while moving down the list in ranking order.  Once your recruiting board is full, you are done with part 1 of this recruiting guide.  Please look for part 2 where we will deal with recruiting board organization and scouting.

     Included below is a video I made demonstrating some of the basic recruiting concepts discussed above.  I used a computer and EA Sports NCAA Football 13 Dynasty website to make this video.

NCAA Football 13 Recruiting Guide Part 1 Video

     Please leave a comment with your questions or suggestions.