Taking the Mystery Out of Recruiting: Part II

Are you tired of the long drawn out mentally challenging battle that is recruiting in NCAA Football 08? Well, never fear, so are we! In fact, after playing 10 long seasons of Dynasty mode in my last Dynasty I was about ready to pull out my hair due to the complexity that is NCAA's recruiting system. I'm going to take a look at a few of DigitalSportsMania's finest users suggestions on recruiting in the coming days and let you judge for yourself if the massive undertaking is doable. Today we are looking at lilbiggio's idea for making recruiting a bit easier on your patience.

One thing that I have started doing is going after just what I need for the next season. That usually winds up being no more than 10 - 15 spots. Then I go and find the replacement player for each position until I have 15 recruits. Then I usually throw in a few BPA's and maybe 3 backup players at the position I need immediate help in. In the case of recruiting less may be more.

It's a lot easier to recruit when you only have 12 people to worry about as opposed to 35. My success rate when I was recruiting to the max and only getting 1 pitch in per phone call wasn't as good, until I started going for less, and then I could squeeze in more pitches per call.

Make sure that if you do this that the recruit is initially interested in you first. It's possible to change a recruits mind, but you might waste valuable time on those recruits, and lose out on what you need.

Finally schedule a majority of your visits late in the year around week 9-11. This is the crucial time that if you have built up your recruit's interest you will knock them out around this time. Early pitches are only good if you can't make up the ground on another team, or if you want to be #1 and try to build a lead on another school that they can't top. Either strategy works, but I find the latter causes more recruits to want to sign in the offseason, and late visits cause more recruits to sign during the season (which makes things a lot easier).

Try this out and see what happens. Once you get your team about 3 or 4 years in with this method, it becomes easier to fill in the gaps, and allows you to never have a need for more than 15 players per year. 

So lilbiggio believes that it is easier to just focus on what you need, and then let the rest of the pieces fall where they may. What do you guys think?