EA Sports NCAA Football

[LL!]

8 minutes ago, Maxx said:

I crushed those numbers as an OC for Miami, top class two years in a row with at least 7 5-Star Recruits each time, full 35 players.  Miami is a very appealing destination, you should visit it sometime 

As for where they go, it was a lot of just cycling the worst players off the team to make room for new ones.   Some tough decisions there because sometimes the worst at a position was someone who was like 80 overall.

I'm playing as FIU. 😭

[Maxx]

Hmm never heard of it, is that like a trade school?

[The Buscher]

35 minutes ago, LL! said:

Agree with these points. It also becomes difficult to be a master recruiter when schools like Oregon are seeing 35 players committing (almost 30 4-star recruits and 5 5-star recruits!) despite the fact that they've not been able to do much in terms of winning their conference let alone a national title in literal years. 

First,  it's crazy that you're signing that many to begin with. Second, where do they all go? Cause surely the roster cap is going to be incredibly excessive.

If I am able to get 20 guys committed then I feel I had a good recruitment haul but the game won't rate it anywhere near the top 5. And already with 20 I struggle with the roster cap.

As I understand it, the class ratings are based on an actual algorithm used in real life so I don't so much fault the difficulty in getting a top class on the game's ratings as much as I think some of these schools over-recruit.  Generally the schools near the top of the recruiting board are the ones you'd expect but it's fairly obscene seeing a school land like 20 4-star players.  A bunch might flip off of playing time issues but if they're going there for proximity to home they'll stay forever even if it means they're on the bench their whole careers as guys who would walk right into a starting job at a lesser school.  Georgia and North Carolina are particularly OP with the coach abilities but especially Georgia - the in-game Kirby Smart has the CEO functionality which gives them the chance to insta-commit players if they offer a scholarship and they're the #1 school on that player's board.  Well tons of recruits start with Georgia #1 and their pipeline is really good, how can anyone compete when they often times land several 4/5 star recruits before the preseason even ends?

14 minutes ago, Maxx said:

As for where they go, it was a lot of just cycling the worst players off the team to make room for new ones.   Some tough decisions there because sometimes the worst at a position was someone who was like 80 overall.

My first recruiting class was a bit light as I didn't really have a great strategy, though I did pick up a solid number of transfer portal guys to make up for it.  My second class was a lot bigger with 28 players as I try to parse out the bad roster I inherited.  Had to cut a bunch of seniors which wouldn't go over well in real life but was necessary as I try to get young guys to develop.

I don't really like the cut button being labeled as "Encourage to Transfer" - when I saw that I thought it was cool because they'd go to the transfer portal but instead it seems like just a way to make it seem less cruel to cut real-life kids in the game.  A window of "encouraging to transfer" where the guys actually go to the portal would be better.  This plays into the issue with some of the big schools having ridiculous classes, a bunch of these guys will get cut in a year or two and never be seen again instead of going somewhere they could play.

Also I wish I weren't forced to keep a freshman.  Yeah it's cruel to cut someone right after they got there but sometimes you realize you made a mistake and over-recruited a position and now you gotta cut someone who deserves to stay over the dud you signed.

[Meacon Keaton]

I think aiming for 20-25 of the best guys your school can bring in is the key. If you sign 35 people each season, that's 140 folk over four years for a roster of 85. I try to sign no more than 20-25 during regular recruiting and then fill in holes (early NFL entries, transfers leaving, position of weakness) through the portal with 4-8 guys there. It's usually me releasing either the obvious worst player at a position or maybe releasing a junior or senior still buried on the depth chart to make way for my rising underclassmen. 

I'm doing a dynasty with Hawaii and I'm finding it fun and challenging. You have a few Hawaiian players to try to recruit, but most do not care about proximity to home, so the one really good benefit you have as a school is worthless. USC and UCLA have had a field day coming in around week eleven to steal the homegrown guys I'd been recruiting all season.  

What is everyone's favorite offensive playbook to play with? I enjoyed the Wake Forest, slow mesh, playbook. It helped me get acclimated to the passing in this game. I don't trust myself to hit the right button with read options, so I've pretty much written those completely out of my playbooks. And now that they've fixed the Jet Pass, I am using it a bit more often. It used to be a guaranteed 20+ yard play, but the last patch did at least help correct the angles the AI were taking. 

Edited August 19 by Meacon Keaton

[The Buscher]

Long-term you could even view your recruits in 5-year windows instead of 4.  If you build your program into a true powerhouse you might never play true freshmen, giving them a redshirt year and a whole extra year to develop.  85 players over 5 years would be 17 per year.  You'll probably want to bring in a few more than that as you'll lose guys to transfer, going to the NFL, some guys just not developing etc but yeah, over-recruiting will lead to you cutting guys who maybe could still help.

I get why 85 is the roster limit number they use given it's the scholarship limit in the NCAA, but the game's always kinda treated the guys that sign with you because you happened to be at the top of their list when the recruiting window ends as walk-ons so, again, I'd like to at least be able to cut some of those dudes if they weren't as good.  Longer-term suggestion would be to bump the roster up to 100 or something with an indicator on who is on scholarship vs. walk-on.  An overperforming walk-on could automatically enter the transfer portal if you don't slap a scholarship on them.

[Meacon Keaton]

If the NCAA rule of "no more walk-ons" gets approved, the limit of scholarship players will jump to 105. I wouldn't be surprised if CFB 26 has 105 player rosters in preparation for that. 

[LL!]

1 hour ago, Maxx said:

Hmm never heard of it, is that like a trade school?

Yeah! The trade is football and I'm building them into a powerhouse. 😤

[The Buscher]

Successfully recruited a 4-star green diamond QB to UConn based on him living in MA and valuing being close to home.  He's a scrambling QB with a 93 speed rating and he's left-handed, so I basically have a modern day Mike Vick.  Pairing him with a 4-star freshman recruit from NJ who also wanted to be close to home and he's a 6'5" physical archetype. 

A 3-star TE I recruited in my first season spent his first season on redshirt ended up having the highest progression ratings and he skyrocketed from like a 75 to a 92 OVR.  He'll spend this year catching passes from one of my two seniors - either incumbent starter Nick Evers or Chad's son Cole Pennington who I brought over from Marshall, while the two flashy recruits redshirt.  If my season tanks I'll start the kids for 2-3 games to get their feet wet while preserving the redshirt and hopefully getting big development bumps.

Either way I'm super excited to get through this season to revise my playbook next year to add all kinds of fun stuff for my QB.  Option games are gonna be a blast now and he'll have two great weapons to start with.

[Twist]

Running the option is an absolute blast once you get your head round the controls.

[The Buscher]

The ability to mass sub was added with the click of a button in the latest update.  However, the functionality of it is pretty much identical to how mass subs would work in a blowout.  The CPU still will disregard redshirt status.  Even if these guys are not even listed on your depth chart in dynasty mode, the CPU will plop them in forcing you to take them back out of the depth chart.  There's still a risk of 4th/5th stringers being inserted into ST formations and losing eligibility over it.

Speaking of ST, this is more of a Madden thing than a CFB thing but I've always found it funny that long snappers are always in Madden but they're always like a 45 OVR TE that every CPU team cuts in preseason.  They can't give them stats that would see them actually play.  They can't add LS as its own position because they'd need to actually create a snapping stat and make it possible to have high/low/bad snaps instead of the current environment where the user has no control of snaps and blocks are largely scripted (as in, like a 1 in 50 chance that the game will literally slow the motions down to give you a chance to time a block).  So like, why the hell bother even having them in there?

[Szumi]

Yeah I did the mass subs yesterday and I also was pretty sure it did more subs after a series to put even more backups in. Ended up mass subbing all the first team back in and doing it all myself.

I'm definitely still struggling to find the best sliders to keep the game a bit more realistic and challenging. I pretty much have a pass defense that will maybe force 3-5 incompletions a match, but always force 4th downs because the AI QB always throws short. Trying to get My/CPU sliders tweaked for run/pass blocking remains a game by game struggle.

I just wish they could her let you do specific substitutions for packages before ever playing a game. Freaking Madden lets you do it! NCAAF not having that is a ridiculous dropped ball moment. I hate having to try and do the substitutions for packages during the game. Always running the risk of a delay of game!