College Football 26 recruitment and scouting guide

How do you successfully use the College Football 26 recruitment and scouting features? If you want to take your one-star school all the way to the National Championship, you will need to be very good at College Football 26 recruiting.

Unlike other sports games where you can scout and draft players, or just buy them outright, in College Football 26, you have to convince the most sought-after prospects and talented high school players that your program is the right one for them. So, how do you do this? In our recruitment guide, we'll walk you through the basics of recruiting and discuss how you can maximize the impact of every recruitment class to speed your way through Dynasty mode and become a true icon of college football.

Before you even play a game in Dynasty, you will be invited to fill out your recruitment board. Whether you're an SEC powerhouse like Alabama or a Sun Belt minnow like Arkansas State, you have 35 scholarships you can offer each season.

That means you need to be particularly careful about offering them to players, as you can't retract an offer once it is sent. You'll get that slot back if the player commits to a different school, but if you offer to five quarterbacks and they all accept, you'll be in trouble. It also costs resources to offer a scholarship, so if you are starting off as a two-star school, there is no point trying to compete with Georgia or Ohio State for the biggest prospects in the country.

The prospect list holds every potential player you could sign. You'll see that some players have already crossed your school off their list as you have an attribute they consider a deal breaker. This could be due to distance from home, your playing style, or that you already have a lot of players at their position, and they don't want to wait around for game time.

You'll also see a list of team needs at the top, helping you know which gaps in the roster are coming up and will need filling. This is especially useful so you don't fill your class with cornerbacks and end up without any defensive tackles on your roster.

You can add players from the prospect list to the recruiting board. It is from the recruiting board that you can start scouting and interacting with players, and will eventually convince them to sign with you.

Prioritizing players

Because you only have 35 scholarships per year, it is important to prioritize your search. Even the biggest schools can't guarantee a player will want to join them, so you need to understand the motivations of each player.

The biggest one is something called the pipeline. This is a geographical catchment area around your school, and players from the local area will be more interested in joining you. The highest rating is five, so as a big school, your priority should be five-star recruits with a pipeline rating of five. Then work your way to five-star recruits with a four pipeline, four-star recruits with a five pipeline, and so on.

Of course, if you are a two-star school, even a five-star, five pipeline player is unlikely to decide to join you. So know your limits. You should only really target a handful of players who are two stars above your own rating.

There are only so many five-star recruits each year, but there is an army of three and two-star players out there. So how do you decide which players to offer scholarships to?

Scouting

Scouting players is pretty straightforward, but it does require resource management. Rather than assigning scouts to go and watch their high school games, you will start with a currency called Hours. Each school starts with a different number of Hours available. The bigger the school, the more Hours you have.

You can spend Hours to learn more about a player's attributes. It takes 50 Hours to fully scout a player, but you can do it in ten-Hour chunks. One chunk will give you a rough gauge of their attributes, but if you fully scout them, you will see a set of exact attributes as well as mental talents.

Once fully scouted, you may get a green diamond or a blank diamond with a red cross appear. The green diamond means they are more likely to overachieve their rating. So if they are a three-star recruit, they could end up playing like a four-star. If it's a red cross diamond, that four-star recruit might end up playing like a three-star one.

If you already like what you see, you can offer a scholarship at the cost of five Hours. But before you do, make sure to check the Overview, which will show a prospect's top-rated schools. If you aren't in there, you should hold fire with the scholarship offer.

Convincing players

Some players will already want to come to you and just need the offer. That's great, but what about the others?

As the season progresses, you can start trying to convince players that you are the right place for them. From the recruiting board, you can go to the recruiting section of each player and select "Add Action".

Here, you can spend up to 50 hours influencing a player's impression of you. The available options are:

• Search Social Media - five Hours
• DM the Player - ten Hours
• Contact Friends and Family - 25 Hours
• Send the House - 50 Hours

The more Hours you spend on a prospect, the more influence you will have on them. This doesn't guarantee a player will want to come to you, but it certainly helps move you up their board.

A player will narrow down their options to a top-five list. If your program makes it that far, things kick up a notch.

Arranging visits

Once a player has set their top five schools, you can invite them on a visit. This is your chance to really show off your school.

Scheduling visits also costs Hours, and it's important to pick the right week for them to come. If you schedule the visit for a game week, make sure it's a game you win, as the result will influence them.

You should also schedule complimentary visits. If you are chasing after two quarterbacks, don't have them come at the same time, as they will view it negatively. Instead, pair them with wide receivers and offensive linemen, as those relationships are positive.

You'll also need to pick an activity for them. You'll see a list of motivations on the right-hand side, along with your grade in that factor and whether it is important to the player. Select the factor that you excel at most from the two or three that the player thinks are important.

At this point, you can also access additional actions to help influence the player. These are:

• Sway - 30 Hours
• Soft Sell - 20 Hours
• Hard Sell - 40 Hours

You may need to retract your previous actions if you want to use these new ones, as you are still bound by the 50 Hours maximum. But they are highly influential, so it is worth doing.

Growing year on year

As we mentioned previously, some players will have deal-breakers on things like program prestige and competitiveness. So, how do you get those five-star recruits in if you're only a two-star program?

Well, at first, you don't. You need to win games, win your conference, and break into the Playoffs before the biggest prospects will start to consider you an option.

That's where strategising on the field and using the best College Football 26 playbooks comes in. If you can win on the field, your prestige as a coach and competitiveness as a program will grow.

Picking out the local three-star prospects that might want to join your program early on is key if you are a small school. Prioritizing fast players at wide receiver, running back, linebacker, and in the secondary is a good start, as they will help you make big plays on the field and cause some upsets.

Growing your reputation is a slow process, and it may take some years before you join the powerhouse schools. But once you do, those five-star players will be lining up to commit to you. And you can create a dynasty to rival Nick Saban.

For tips to use once you're on the field, check out our best College Football playbooks guide.