College Football 25 Recruiting Tricks to Have Fun and Dominate in the Process

Chase Becotte

Published: Dec 11, 2024 12:33 pm

When I first put together an all-in-one recruiting guide for College Football 25 for this newsletter back in September, my aim was to teach you the core mechanics and how to understand the ways to put together the best recruiting classes you could in the most efficient ways possible. I certainly want this guide to be informative as well, but I also want it to act as a key that unlocks some of your most harebrained recruiting and team-building ideas. In other words, I want to get a little silly with this College Football 25 recruiting guide in between explaining how certain things have changed with recruiting through the year.

Gems And Busts Have Changed A Bit

For most of this year, we settled into believing that gem status mostly tied into the development trait. I was always clear that a 5-star player is a 5-star player and you should mostly want as many of them as possible, but players who had the crossed-out “bust” gem were sometimes avoided because the feeling was that they’d either have Impact or Normal development traits — and that’s true. However, this is no longer true.

Here’s a look at one of my 5-star recruits:

Look at that, Star development trait. So what does this mean? Well, in a general sense, I think what you should take from it is that 5-star players should never be ignored, but beyond that, gems may involve more than just the development trait now. It might also tie into OVR ratings or at least particular ratings that matter for that player. The prospect above (Byndom) came it at 77 overall, which is perfectly reasonable for a 5-star recruit, and his skill caps were “normal” — not amazing, but he had plenty of room for growth, which is good because he’s a Star. What I did notice about him compared to other Power Rushers who are just barely better than him is that he had low ratings for awareness, coverage, and catching.

So what the gems may now be factoring into the equation are certain player ratings (if not the OVR itself). However, I do not think skill caps tie into the gem equation — those still seem to tie most closely to the development trait. On the whole, you’ll see Star/Elite players have fewer skill caps than Impact players, which is nothing new.

Beyond 5-star players, I think 4-star players also should remain in your plans even if they are busts if you like certain attributes about them you’ve scouted. Once you get to 3-star players, continue using the logic you’ve used all year (green gems are worth chasing, busts are not for the most part). The players with no gems continue to fall into all the development trait buckets. I’ve had “Elite” development traits on 3, 4, and 5-star players with no gems tied to them.

There is more to say about 4-star and 3-star players though, so let’s get to that next.

Gems Were Not Nerfed — At Least Not In A Traditional Sense

There has been some talk about gems being worse now, and I think while there is something to that theory on some level, it doesn’t have much to do with the gems themselves.

I’m going to mention T4G Sports a couple times in this guide, but this first time I’ll point to a video of theirs where they go through 3-star and 4-star gems to determine if they’re outputting fewer high-end development traits. Ultimately, they find that nothing major has changed with gems at the 3-star and 4-star level.

You can watch the video to get the full breakdown (it’s informative even if nothing major has changed).

Prospects Overall Have Been Nerfed A Bit Though

That said, while it’s going to be anecdotal since EA hasn’t officially said anything, I do think recruits overall are not coming in as hot as they were weeks to months ago. Content creator Poodle put out a video on this topic that’s worth watching.

Overall, it does seem like fewer players are getting top-end abilities/mentals from the get-go. I think this is ultimately a good thing because it was a little easy to find “generational” talent each year in dynasty mode. It also makes finding those true freaks more fun to me. For example, OS user georgiafan recently posted probably the sickest 4-star Power Back recruit I’ve seen in the recruiting thread on OS:

Having 96 speed on a 4-star Power Back is so good — in general, it’s very hard to find sick Power Backs.

When you unearth that platinum Field General QB/ATH, it feels like a big deal now. The one downside to me is that it does make the initial years of your dynasty feel a little more uneven. If you look at the skill caps and abilities of players on the initial roster versus the majority of the players in your recruiting classes, the skill caps ranges are especially noticeable — there will be many more skill caps on the recruits vs. the real players — thus limiting the ceiling of your recruits vs. the real players.

You can take advantage of that to an extent by really focusing on using the “real” players early in your dynasties or simply being more aggressive in the transfer portal during Years 1 and 2. While transfers do not get any offseason training boosts (I don’t think that’s a bug but rather by design for whatever reason) and thus their ratings won’t move that first offseason, it’s still probably worth snagging a bunch of freshmen and sophomores in the portal those first two seasons of your dynasty.

The one other thing to note from this breakdown is it does seem like more players are getting the “gem” status now. It doesn’t mean those gem players are fakes, but because it doesn’t seem like the gem status is strictly about development traits anymore, more players are finding their way to gem status through other means — even if we’re not quite sure what those other means might be.

Athletes Rule The World

It’s been known that ATH Scrambler QBs have generally been the best players to target at the QB position because they come in with high speed and throw power ratings a lot of the time. The “normal” Scramblers usually have higher throw power but their top-end speeds aren’t usually as impressive.

But the thing about having the ATH archetype is that it plays elsewhere. Recruiting athletes is the best way to find those freaks you might not be finding as easily anymore with “traditional” recruits. They’re versatile as well because they don’t need to go at the position they’re listed at while you recruit them.

ATH QBs might be fun projects at CB, WR, RB, TE, and even S. You’re not going to ever recruit a 6-foot-5 safety, but if you recruit athletes, you might be able to field a whole defense where no one in the secondary is under 6-foot-4. Of course, that isn’t very realistic, but the point is you can do it, and it can be very fun because it just opens up wacky new ways to build your squad.

So when in doubt, recruit athletes. Once they’re on campus and you can do position changes, sort by position and look at your spoils:

Look at all those ATHs. It’s the best sort of mystery box. Those ATHs could be anything, even a boat!

You’ll even be surprised at times that someone like an ATH Elusive Back is actually best suited perhaps for OLB:

It’s worth having a quick conversation about “weight” while pointing to this specific player. Do I think someone 173 pounds is suited for OLB? Probably not, but weight doesn’t seem to matter in this game. What I tend to do to make it at least a little “realistic” is just RS this sort of player and add 10 pounds to him each offseason via the Edit Player feature.

So if you’re struggling to find DTs or FS/SS, never forget athletes. Here are some athlete permutations to remember as you scout:

ATH QBs to CB/WR/RB/TE/S
ATH WR to RB or CB or TE
ATH Power HB to LB or DE
ATH Elusive RB to CB or S or OLB
ATH Receiving RB to WR (especially for a slot role)
ATH Physical WR to TE or MLB or S
ATH centers to DT, FB, G (guard more than tackle because the added agility/acceleration can create some more ways to expand your run game)
ATH TE to DE or S

You can probably find even more permutations, but those are the ones I generally stick to.

A bonus one to think about is just moving Hybrid safeties to MLB as soon as they’re on campus. That idea also brings us to the concept of position changes that don’t involve athletes.

Take Big Swings With Position Changes With Your Depth Pieces

Recruiting athletes is one thing, but you can get really silly if you just start taking players on your team who maybe are never going to be the “answer” at a position and just start moving them around. Again, because weight doesn’t really matter it opens up more possibilities than you might want to actually take advantage of — it’s silly to move an elusive RB to DT and so on (I’m not sure if it would even be a good idea, but you can technically do it). Either way, those backups at one position might be future starters (or even stars) elsewhere. For example, their skill caps at their original position might not be as big deal when they’re re-rolled for that new position.

The best way to understand this is to show some examples, but before getting to those examples, I need to remind you that position changes happen before the training results occur. What that means is you may get an immediate impactful boost right after you change the position of someone. It’s more common to get that “big” boost the following offseason, but if you drop a player from a 77 overall RB to a 46 overall S, they might get a lot of those ratings right back with the training boosts.

I’ll talk more about the possible “whys” behind that as we go through these examples.

First up, here is Darrius Davis. He is a real player who is a safety at Stanford. During the first offseason, I changed him from a safety to a MLB — a relatively “safe” change. He was a 68 OVR at safety and after the initial offseason training boost he was a 71 overall MLB — so already an improvement even after dropping below a 68 when he was moved to MLB.

Now, here is how he looks after the first offseason:

He “only” went up 10 OVR, but he’s a 91 speed MLB with great change of direction and solid hands. He’s going to be a Junior, and we can look at how his skill caps look.

So why can he jump a bunch of points? Well, you need to realize that each rating category comes with costs associated with it. Quickness costs 13 points to upgrade by one point. All the other categories are going to cost less than that. So if you have a fast player (for the position), then he doesn’t necessarily need to spend points on the most expensive category in this case (which is Quickness). This allows him to spend points on cheaper categories and gain many more points in those categories.

Now, some of the OVR jumps you see will absolutely be inflated by simply not having 40 Awareness anymore. The CPU will dump a bunch of points into Awareness and by default your OVR is going to go up a lot because that’s just how the OVR is being calculated. But the point remains that while Davis still might not start, he’s got an avenue to making an impact at MLB, and he didn’t at S in my dynasty.

Now, to a more extreme example. DeAndre Ty was a 6-foot-4 WR I decided to move to CB as soon as he got on campus. Here is how he looked during his RS season:

A nice, tidy, 41 overall. Now, again, he’s going to get zero offseason training boosts that first year because he was a fresh recruit, so he was a 41 overall his entire Redshirt campaign.

Now, here he is after his first offseason training boost:

A 79 overall (a +38 jump in OVR in the first true offseason). Again, look at the Awareness rating before getting too excited. It went from 64 to 99 so the OVR is going to be inflated a bit because of that. The CPU chose to dump his points into that rating, but that’s okay because let’s look at his skill caps.

Yeah, this guy is going to be very good by next offseason in most scenarios — and his skill caps aren’t even that impressive. It’s still only costing 2 points to raise his man coverage ratings, and he’s still got plenty of room to grow in the zone coverage category as well. The CPU could choose to spend the points in more expensive categories, but ultimately I feel confident this guy will probably be a 6-foot-4 starting CB for me by next year. (Reminder, you don’t really get to recruit 6-foot-4 CBs if you only recruit traditional CBs.)

Let’s go to one more extreme example. I moved Chris Davis Jr. (a real life RB for the Stanford Cardinals) to SS. He got to have an initial training day because he was already on my team and so I changed the position before the training results. This is what he looked like after that first offseason.

Even after the training he was only a 51 overall. Pretty bad. Now, here he is after his second offseason:

He’s now at a 66 overall (+15 OVR), got the House Call ability, and notice his Awareness is still just 63 so the CPU chose to spend his points in other areas. For example, you can see his Man Coverage rating jumped from 48 to 82.

I would say he still might never be worth using (unless you user him) because his play recognition is super low (on top of the awareness) but we can still look at his breakdown.

His lack of skill caps is great (and again makes my point about how real players tend to have fewer skill caps than generated recruits), but it’s starting to get pricey to upgrade Pass Coverage, and 57 Zone Coverage on a safety is very bad. Regardless, while Davis Jr. may never be an answer at safety, I know he wasn’t going to ever get a lot of touches at RB so it was still worth a shot. You don’t have to give up on him either. He can continue to be a bench player, and maybe next offseason he takes another big leap and suddenly is part of the equation when he’s a Junior.

All in all, these sort of extreme position changes have boom/bust potential, but your patience will be rewarded more times than not, and you’ll be shocked by some of the players you end up using who maybe were just average 2-star or 3-star recruits when they got on campus.

There Is No “Best” Coaching Tree

Depending on who you ask, you can get very passionate responses about the best way to spend your points and build your coach (for the record, I really did like this Coaching Tree tier list by OS user ExpedientFalcon). I’m here to say I don’t believe there is a perfect way or one “meta” way to build your coach.

Now, that’s not to say I don’t think certain things aren’t “must haves” or anything like that. I do believe Recruiter is the best coaching tree, and I do think Tactician is the most concrete and easiest to track when it comes to how it’s helping your team. However, because the “fog of war” is so strong and because EA does not surface things like training results with any amount of helpful info alongside it, we’re left to wonder how much things are helping your team.

For example, you can find plenty of people who think the Motivator tree is both the best and worst thing in the game to spend points on. It all comes down to whether or not you believe the “offseason training boost” matters or not. I’m not here to make a guess one way or another because we’re just not going to get a proper sample size to really gauge it. We’d need to continuously make save states and then check the before and after with training results, and then also spend the points on those Motivator skills or not each time as well. That is an all-around headache, and we shouldn’t be expected to do that sort of “science” on our own.

You can find people all over Reddit and elsewhere who have run some tests, and you can take from them what you will — and I respect the hell out of them for using their own time to run those tests — but I’m not going to even try to have a stance on this because there’s just not enough data to make judgments about things like offseason training boosts.

None of us know for sure how it works because EA doesn’t even show green arrows on where players improved in the offseason — let alone where they’re spending points during the season. I’m all for the “fog of war” but it’s an oversight by EA that there are no easy ways to track how your XP is being spent minus taking videos of the before and after for your players. The green arrows you do notice are likely because you spent points on the “blue” coaching tree (Tactician tree) — or one of your assistants did — and it’s just showing you the attributes are being boosted by that ability.

So it comes down to whether or not you trust EA enough to believe the abilities are doing what they say they’re doing. And even if you do trust EA, we have no idea what the multiplier is on the offseason training boosts that you’re now receiving. And, to be clear, I’m mostly okay with that. I love how progression works in this game overall and how we don’t have direct control over most of it, but in the future EA does at least need to do a better job surfacing how points are being spent.

But Stacking Does Matter

I say all that but do believe stacking your coaching abilities does matter. Stacking in this case means doubling or tripling down on abilities through your assistant coaches. If you believe in the offseason progression of the Motivator tree, spend your own points on them and then keep hiring coaches until you get as many of those boosts as possible stacked up together. When you’re hiring a coach, you can’t look at what their actual abilities are — I’d be happy to be wrong here if someone says otherwise — so you won’t be able to know for sure what abilities someone has beyond knowing they’re mostly in the Recruiter tree etc. But whether it takes one offseason or three, you’re eventually going to settle on assistant coaches who are stacking the abilities you want in the way you want.

It’s not that having some ability points spread out throughout your coaches is bad or anything, but we have concrete feedback that proves stacking abilities does work. If you have three coaches who all have certain abilities in the Recruiting tree, you can see that multiplier in action when using your points to scout and so on.

The bottom line here is this is a pro-multiplier guide. When it comes to coaching abilities, I do believe being the jack of all trades means you’re master of none.

Spend Your Scouting Hours Wisely

Once again I point you towards T4G Sports for some very good information about scouting and identifying gems. As a small school with low prestige, you know how important it is to efficiently spend your recruiting hours. And, for the record, if you’ve ever wondered what determines your weekly hours, here is the breakdown. It’s just based on your program tier/prestige so it’s easy to calculate.

But when it comes to scouting, you’re scouting archetypes. These archetypes are mostly going to fall into attribute buckets that are based around a player’s star rating. T4G Sports has compiled (and continues to compile) the buckets most players will fall into if they’re going to be a gem (or a hidden gem even, which is a player who doesn’t get gem status but is hitting attribute benchmarks that might mean they’re going to get a better-than-expected development trait).

But to officially find gems, you need to 100 percent scout a player. However, if you use T4G’s tables, you can usually guess early on whether they have a chance to be a gem or not. Now, I don’t really use the tables to figure out whether someone will be a gem, I use the tables to get out early on a player I feel confident won’t be a gem.

If an archetype is not hitting the ranges (or is on the very low end of the ranges) for multiple categories early on, then I know it’s usually not going to end with that green gem popping on the screen. It takes a handful of players before you get more confident in your guesswork, but following the attribute ranges in the tables will soon start to feel normal. Plus, if a player is hitting way outside those ranges in the positive direction, you can get more excited about the player even before that green gem pops on the screen.

T4G has a full breakdown of how to scout for 3-star gems
They have an ongoing breakdown of how to scout for 4-star gems (I believe it’s still a WIP because some positions are not covered as of yet)
And they’ve even started to compile which times it makes more sense to target 4-star gems at a position/archetype vs. just mostly focusing on 3-star gems at that position/archetype

Let’s Not Forget What The Most Powerful Recruiting Tools Are

As a final point, I want to return to a more standard sort of guide and make sure we’re still following best practices for recruiting. For that info, I point us back to an old friend from the prior guide: Max Plays CFB. Max loves creating very in-depth and helpful charts that point out what is worth doing and what is not worth doing when recruiting.

I already explained in the last guide how powerful the Hard Sell is, and Max explained the thresholds you should be hitting for grades to do Hard Sells. Since then, he’s explained why the Soft Sell is generally not worth it when you have 65 hours to spend on a recruit:

In short, spend the 40 hours on Hard Sell and 25 hours on Friends and Family in almost all cases.

On top of that, he went into visits and when they’re worth it. I think I was a little too down on visits in my initial guide, and they’re still not a top priority for me, but if you truly believe you’re going to destroy an opponent, then visits are worth those 40 hours.

When it comes to visits, you should never schedule them on bye weeks versus just spending the 25 hours on Friends in Family (the exception maybe being during the Transfer Portal because of how you can stack up complementary visits). However, visits can be very helpful if you schedule them on weeks where you win big — and that’s regardless of whether you can stack a bunch of complementary visits together during that week.

For me, I lose enough games where scheduling visits will never be my top priority, but if you want to “game” the system, scheduling a home game cupcake or two between that Week 4-7 window is how you can maximize your recruiting classes as you would schedule as many as 8 visits during those windows to almost guarantee a bunch of recruits choosing your school.

And with that, I once again feel I have written far too much about recruiting, but I hope it was educational, enjoyable, and worth your time.

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