Ranking the Best Pipelines in College Football 25

Look, math is back, and you just need to accept that if you want to min/max recruiting in EA Sports College Football 25. There is plenty of fun to be had even if you don’t want to crunch the numbers, but some of the most incredible work being done on the “math” front comes from Reddit user al_ways-becrootin.

Ranking The Best Pipelines In College Football 25

Pipelines are rated out of five, with five being the best possible score:

• Pink is 5
• Blue is 4
• Gold is 3
• Silver is 2
• Bronze is 1

There’s a deeper guide to be made about pipelines overall and everything that goes into them, but this is the “fun” guide that’s just full of rankings. And, again, Reddit user al_ways-becrootin has the goods.

Coach Croot has created a dope spreadsheet with four awesome tabs:

• Pipelines for CFB25 outlines all the schools in the game and the pipelines associated with each school (plus their ranking out of five for each pipeline).
• Team Pipeline Ranks gives an actual value to each team’s starting pipelines and thus tells you which teams have the best pipeline ranking. There is a Base Rank and Zenkei Rank (more on that difference in a moment).
• Pipeline Breakdown By Conference details which conferences have which pipelines. This is perhaps most helpful when you create a Team Builder squad or want to change conferences, but it also gives you an idea of which pipelines are going to be a battle in each conference.
• Pipeline List gives you a better idea about which states/areas each pipeline covers (it’s also worth noting Illinois can’t be selected for a coaching pipeline when you create a coach since it’s bugged).

Getting back to the Base Rank and Zenkei Rank, to keep the nerding out to a minimum just understand that the Zenkei Rank is slightly more nuanced than the Base Rank. The Zenkei Rank includes considerations for how “congested” a pipeline is with other teams (and thus how many are competing for recruits in that pipeline), and it also gives added weight to rank 4 and 5 pipelines as they’re much stronger than rank 1-3 pipelines (i.e. bronze, silver, gold). This means your recruiting actions are supercharged on pipeline players if you have a tier 4 or 5 ranking for that pipeline.

But the other thing to remember with pipelines and these rankings is they still come down to players. As a reminder, here’s what EA has said about pipelines:

And the players coming out of these pipelines (averaged out over many dynasty runs) is how the schools end up with these rankings. It’s worth noting that five-star recruits are more random than three-star recruits and four-star recruits in terms of where those players will come from year to year (probably because there’s only 32 five-star recruits each year), so they’re not factored into these rankings either.

If you just want to see the pipeline ranks, Coach Croot has you covered here as well:

Texas owns, followed by Central Florida, Southern California, Atlanta, and Tidewater.

Best Schools To Use Based On Pipelines

This top 10 list should not be too shocking, pipelines or not:

1. Alabama
2. Clemson
3. Georgia
4. Ohio State
5. Texas A&M
6. Oklahoma
7. LSU
8. Texas
9. Auburn
10. Florida

The worst school with a Tier 5 pipeline (pink) is Cincinnati (47th overall). The worst school with a Tier 4 pipeline rank (blue) is Iowa. Iowa is actually ranked 125th based on pipeline rank, which is wild.

TCU, Maryland, Arizona State, Vanderbilt, and Stanford are a handful of schools that surprised me in the top 30 for these rankings.

Best One-Star Schools Based On Pipelines

One other fun bit of information we can extrapolate from these rankings is what are the best one-star schools to use if you want to have a shot at the best pipelines?

1. Rice
2. East Carolina
3. Old Dominion
4. USF
5. Arkansas State
6. Georgia State
7. Louisiana
8. FIU
9. Georgia Southern
10. FAU

Of course, a team like Rice will only be level three (gold) to start with the North Texas and East Texas pipelines, but your coach can get that level up to five (pink) if you dig into the Program Builder abilities after winning five playoff games. At that point, you basically turn Rice into a beast of a school.

And if you needed to know again why Kennesaw State is maybe the hardest team to turn into a powerhouse, look no further than their dead-last ranking for pipeline score.