College Football 25 Quickie Guide: How Instant Commits Work

Any curiosities about how instant commits work in College Football 25 should also include questions about scholarships and whether you should offer them right away or hold them until later. So let’s quickly answer both these questions in this short and tidy guide.

What Drives Instant Commits?

First off, instant commits when you offer a scholarship are a major dice roll and very random. Any answers I give about how instant commits work come with that major caveat. Still, we can put ourselves in the best position to get instant commits if we understand a couple things:

1. You can get them at any stage, whether it’s Top 3, Top 5, Top 8, or before a potential recruit has cut down his list at all. However, we’re really wondering more about Week 1 of recruiting for this idea most of the time — at which point a recruit has not chopped down his list at all and all we can do is offer scholarships and scout players.
2. You can only get an instant commit if that player’s interest level is 1st overall for your school.
3. The interest meter does matter, but only to an extent. The instant commits can still happen either way, but when you have a larger lead over the next closest team in second place that’s good. It’s even better if your status bar for that recruit is closer to “full” for reaching the next stage of recruiting (Top 8, Top 5, and so on). However, I really would not worry too much about this component since randomness is still king here.
4. The prestige rating of your school does seem to matter. Let’s say you’re number one (somehow) for a five-star recruit while at a two-star school. It’s not likely that the player will instant commit even if everything is going your way because you’re “beneath” him. However, if Alabama comes knocking for a three-star recruit, it’s more likely they’ll instantly get that player if Alabama meets the other requirements.

Just to show off a couple examples, I used Penn State with default coaches rather than my own starting coach. From there, I put every player who was first in interest level for my squad who was three stars or above on my recruiting board. This was 31 players. I offered scholarships to all 31 and got two of them. Here’s the two I got:

There’s not much to take from that except that the bar is almost all the way full on Stewart and then about halfway full on Bauer. But I don’t have big leads over the next closest school, and one is a three-star recruit and the other is a four-star recruit. I only had one five-star recruit to even try this on, and it did not work out. Point being, don’t go too crazy trying to guess if you will be able to do snag these recruits by just looking at the interest bar.

One other way to improve your chances of getting instant commits is within the the Coaching Abilities, and it’s the CEO tree. To even unlock the CEO tree, you need to win two national titles and have 30 coins to spend. If you think that sounds excessive, well, that’s the point, it’s reserved for the very best coaches. If you start with a coach already in the game, you can hunt and see if any teams have the CEO tree unlocked from the start (spoiler, look in the SEC and ACC).

Within the CEO skill tree, there is an ability called Dream School that will help you get instant commits:

On top of winning the national titles, you also need 18 coins to grab the Dream School ability. It’s a tall task, but this ability does absolutely help your odds of securing instant commits.

Should You Hold Your Scholarships Or Not?

For the other part of this equation, you might be wondering whether this random chance is worth withholding your scholarship until you check off more of the boxes that improve your chances of securing an instant commit.

To answer this question, Max Plays CFB is a great source for some math behind some of these questions since EA doesn’t really give us a guide on a lot of this stuff (a good or bad thing depending on what aspects of the game we’re talking about, but in this case I think it’s good). I’ll embed the video below.

This is a quick guide though so if you don’t want to watch all 7+ minutes of that video, understand that holding your scholarships are not worth it, according to Max. I agree with him 99 out of 100 times. There is a case to be made for the truly elite schools that are only looking to secure specific top-end players holding scholarships for the perfect shot at an instant commit, but even those cases are silly to consider for the most part because you’re already one of the best schools. Chances are if you just follow “basic” recruiting principles you’ll win most recruiting battles, and you need to be number one for a prospect in the first place to secure any recruit with this method.

Plus, consider that in Week 1 all you can do is scout and offer scholarships. Even if you want to go crazy scouting players, you need to understand that those five points for a scholarship are the best value in all of recruiting. Plus, there is no other way to make the interest level for a player go up in Week 1. So even though you might be wary to give up one of your 35 potential scholarships in Week 1, that’s not really a big enough reason to withhold the scholarship.

Beyond that, think of a scholarship like chip damage in something like a fighting game. One little hit is not a big deal, but those hits add up over time. The same is true with a scholarship offer. Even if those five points are all you ever spend on a player, you can still get some of those players because that scholarship increases a player’s interest week by week.

For Jalen Folkerts here, you can see the only thing I have offered him is a scholarship (and it was a couple weeks ago), and yet if you see the darker area on Penn State’s status bar, he has still gone up a bit since last week. This is the power of a scholarship, and this is why you should offer 35 of them during Week 1 (so save at least 175 of your hours in Week 1 — you can always offer more than 35 as well if you wanted to hunt some instant commits but otherwise were not interested in that player).