College Football 26 Recruiting Guide - How to Recruit in Dynasty

College Football 26's Dynasty Mode can be a lot of fun, though recruiting new recruits can feel pretty intimidating. In Dynasty, you need to find talented recruits and convince them to play for your school next year. However, it won't be easy, as competing schools and other factors affect where a recruit ends up going. Therefore, we created this College Football 26 Recruiting Guide to help you understand how the process works in Dynasty.

How Do You Recruit Players In College Football 26?

In order to recruit players in College Football 26, you need to create a list of prospects that you want to recruit. To do that, go to the Prospect List on your Recruiting Board (available on the main Dynasty menu). But there's a bit more to it than that, so we'll go over everything from the beginning.

Coach Creation, Backstory, & Pipeline

Firstly, we recommend creating a coach with a Recruiter backstory. This backstory unlocks a set of upgrades that you can get with Coach Points. These abilities, in turn, provide you with more bonuses for recruiting both high school players and players on the transfer portal.

Furthermore, you can also edit your Pipeline, which may help you secure players from certain areas. If you have a Pipeline in Alabama, and there's a recruit from there you want, you already have a slight in.

But all of that said, you can still earn great recruits even without the backstory or similar Pipeline. But they do help give you a slight edge in the beginning of your experience.

Pipelines are broken up into five ranks, 5 being the best, and 1 being the least effective. Regardless any Pipeline connection you share with a player helps. It's better than not having one at all!

Depth Chart & Team Needs

Now before adding a recruit to your recruiting list, take a look at your roster. Identify your strongest and weakest positions. Furthermore, identify which players will be graduating, and which positions you need players for in the future.

For example, if you begin a career with the Miami Hurricanes, your starting QB, Carson Beck, will leave after one season. If that's the case, add a couple QB prospects to your board to evaluate them later on.

The Prospect List

College Football 26's Dynasty Mode adds 4,100 recruits each season for teams to influence. So there'll be no shortage of players who you can choose from. But the trick is to snag as many four and five star recruits as possible.

In the Recruiting Menu, you'll see the Prospect List. From here, you can select up to 35 players to add to your recruitment board. Furthermore, you can filter by position, location, star rating,, and much more. You don't need to add 35 right away, and you can always remove players later on.

To add a player from the Prospect List to your Recruiting Board, just press A (Xbox)/X (PlayStation) when hovering over their name on the list. However, you might need to check a couple of things before really investing time in a recruit.

College Football 26 Dynasty School Grades & How To Improve Them

All schools in College Football 26 have their own Team Prestige star rating, which is determined by their School Grade. These grades matter when trying to sway players to come to your school.

Playing Style – Seasonal stats determine this rating
- How to improve: Check Playing Style in the My School Menu to see which players are at risk of transferring unless you play them
Proximity To Home – Unique to each recruit based on where they live
- How to improve: N/A
Championship Contender – Likeliness of your school winning the national championship
- How to improve – Increase your poll ranking & quality of your roster
Program Tradition – Success of your school based on their history
- How to improve – Increase appearances in National Titles, Playoff Games, Conference Championships, and Bowl Games. Furthermore, Heisman winners help improve this grade too.
Campus Lifestyle – Student experience between games on campus
- How to improve – N/A
Stadium Atmosphere – How much home field advantage your school generates
- How to improve – Increase home winning percentage, home game attendance, and earn winning streaks while improving prestige
Pro Potential – Likeliness of your player going pro
- How to improve – Have several players on your team become projected draft picks in the NFL. 1st round players greatly increase Pro Potential
Brand Exposure – How much attention your school receives relative to the rest of the nation
- How to improve – Playing more in Playoff, National Championship, Game of the Week, Streamed, or National TV game
Academic Prestige – Academic success
- How to improve – N/A
Conference Prestige – Strength of conference relative to the rest of the nation
- How to improve – Average team prestige in the conference must be high. There's a couple things you could do to improve this:
  - Improve your team
  - Use the “Force Win” option on CPU schedules, helping your conference rivals win meaningless games to make the conference look good.
Coach Stability – Organization's confidence as well as Coach's experience in the league
- How to improve – Increase job security, accept long contracts, and keep coordinators with you for the long run.
Coach Prestige – Quality of Coaches
- Hire good coordinators and exceed statistical expectations
Athletic Facilities – Overall quality of Football Facilities
- How to improve – Increase Team Prestige
Playing Time – How soon your recruit will hit the field
- How to improve – Based on depth chart and graduating class. For example, a QB prospect may not want to play on your team if you have two promising Sophomores

Return back to the Prospect List and look at the bottom section of a player's card. This is the Dealbreaker icon, which represents the one value they absolutely need in their future college.

This doesn't mean you can't pursue players with certain Dealbreakers, but you may need to increase certain grades if you want a greater chance of earning them. Now it's finally time to head to the recruiting board.

The Recruiting Board, Explained

In the College Football 26 Recruiting board, you can take the necessary steps to scout and acquire players you want. All players that you added from the Prospect List will be here, and you can even filter by position and other things, if you like.

Before we begin, let's mention a few important details:

You can only offer 35 total scholarships to prospects every season. While you might be tempted to offer a scholarship right away, don't waste them all on players you might not get.
You only have a limited amount of hours per week to actively scout and recruit players. Furthermore, you can only spend a Maximum of 50 hours a week on a prospect (55 if you offer a Scholarship)

Overall, it's important to remain with a player's Top Schools. Over the course of the season, players will reduce the number of schools they want to play. Therefore, if there's a player you really want, focus as many resources as possible on bringing them on board.

However, sometimes players verbally commit early in the season. This tends to happen with high-rated players with a Gem ranking (we'll get to that in just a bit).

Overall, the Recruiting Board has three main sections:

Overview – See general information about your prospect, their top schools, and their Dealbreaker

Scouting – Spend hours learning about a player, their attributes, abilities, and development traits. Furthermore, you can identify Gem players.

What are gems? They essentially help you identify players with better development traits. A player with a green gem has good development traits. But a player with a Red Gem is slower to progress. Many players don't have gems, which means they develop normally.

Recruiting – Dedicate hours to researching a player and influence them to join your team. Overall, you can do a lot on this page, like:

Active Actions – Your current actions. Furthermore, you can also offer Scholarships and schedule visits here.

Again, you only have 35 scholarships to offer per season. And you can only schedule up to four players per week.

Influence – Spend hours influencing the player to join your team. These include actions such as:
- Searching the player on Social Media (5 Hours)
- DM the Player (10 Hours)
- Contact the player's friends and Family (25 hours per week)
- Send the House (50 Hours)

In the influence phase, you learn more about your prospect's wants and needs. The more information you find out about those people, the more equipped you are when you reach the Pitch phase.

Pitch – Show your prospect is the best school for them by showing off your school grades. Two types of pitches exist:
- Soft Sell – 20 hours
- Hard Sell – 40 hours

Soft Sells are low-risk recruiting tactics which can still influence a player's decision. If you don't have time to find out all of their interests, use a soft sell. And if you're wrong, you won't suffer as big a penalty as a hard sell.

Hard Sells are for when you really know your prospect. Once you understand their wants, sell them hard to help influence their decision. Hard Sells are the best way to influence players to join your team.

But you can also Sway Players. This adds your Chosen Ideal Pitch as the recruit's ideal pitch for your school only. So you can sell a player entirely on Playing Time, and you'll still benefit from it. Personally, I recommend this when you know more about your player.

Scheduling Visits

When you're in a Player's Top 5, you can schedule a visit. In College Football 26 Dynasty, you can invite prospects to see your school. You can either invite them to watch a game, or make them visit during the bye week. Both visits increase influence, but the former provides more, if you can win.

For example, say you invite a prospect to watch you play against #1 ranked Georgia. Defeating that team will tremendously increase your stock with that player. Furthermore, you can also invite up to four players every week.

Inviting players on the same position is bad (two CBs may not like the competition). But inviting say, a QB and a WR, is a good thing. They'll believe that you're trying to build something for the future. Additionally, when a player visits, you can sell them on your school values. This adds even more influence, greatly increasing their outlook on your program.

Scheduling a visit

Scheduling Visits – College Football 26 Recruiting Guide

Another unique thing about going into the Top 5 schools list is the ability to schedule a visit. In College Football 26 Dynasty, you'll need to host recruits on visits to see your school. You can either invite them to watch a game, or during the bye week. Both visits will increase your influence, but there's a better risk/reward to the former.

Say you're inviting a recruit on a week where you play against a highly-ranked TCU. If you win, your recruit might be impressed and want to play for you. However, if you lose, it'll look bad. So make sure to schedule a visit for when you're confident in your ability to win.

Furthermore, you can schedule multiple players to visit on a week. We recommend letting compatible position group recruits attend the same visits. For example, I scheduled a 3-star FS to visit my school on a bye week. But I also invited another recruit, a SS, which complemented their visits.

Scheduling a visit costs 10 total week hours. However, those hours aren't spent on influencing the player. So you can spend 10 hours on a visit, and then 50 more on 40 more on a Hard Sell.

Coach Menu – Coach Abilities & XP

In College Football 26, your coach receives experience points to level up throughout the season. Every time you level up, you earn Coach Points. You can spend these points on Coach Abilities within the Coach Tab. You can see how many points you have on the top right corner of the screen.

Additionally, Coaches also earn XP by completing various goals, along with winning games. These goals can be found in the Coach XP Goals menu and are labeled as:

Draft Goals – Receive XP based on which round your player(s) was drafted in
Game Goals – Various in-game goals based on multiple factors
Recruiting Goals – Signing top prospects or classes in the country
Stat Goals – Based on team performance in various categories across the season

The Coach Abilities Menu is a skill-tree where you spend points on upgrades. Now, if you selected a Recruiter background, this is where you can begin to take the upper hand. To do so, you will need to upgrade your recruiting abilities for each position separately. Each tier of an upgrade does the same thing:

Tier 1 – Player takes less time to fully scout
Tier 2 – Increased Starting interest
Tier 3 – Increased interest from transfers
Tier 4 – Increased chance to sway offensive linemen

So if you really need offensive linemen, spend your Coach Points on the Blocking Tree. The more tiers you reach, the more equipped you'll be to recruit better players.

After signing Two Top 5 Recruiting classes (which takes two seasons), you'll gain access to the Elite Recruiter Set. This gives you access to more upgrades once you unlock. By the time you do, you won't need this guide anymore.

Verbal Commitments, The Transfer Portal & Signing Day – College Football 26 Recruiting

As the season progresses, players will either verbally commit to a school or continue narrowing down their options. You'll get locked out if you don't stay within a player's top schools. No worries, you can always remove them and add new prospects.

At the season's end, the Transfer Portal will open up. Although some of your players may leave, you can also acquire new players, too. The Transfer Portal process is essentially a micro-recruiting process where you have a very limited time to influence new prospects.

At this point, you'll have most of the players you need, but the Transfer Portal can sometimes see a high-rated player heading to your program.

Lastly, Early Signing Day begins during Bowl Season, while National Signing Day takes place after. The latter is for players who have not yet made a decision.

Overall, that wraps up our College Football 26 Recruiting Guide in Dynasty Mode. We wish you the best of luck in signing that future 1st round pick! Enjoy the players you recruit in College Football 26 Dynasty!

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