EA Sports College Football 25 Recruiting Tricks: How to Get the Best Recruits

Recruiting the best prospects in EA Sports College Football 25 is the most important part of building a college football dynasty. Well…besides actually winning games, of course. Then again, it’s kind of hard to win games if you don’t have the best players possible.

The basics of recruiting in the game are easy enough to understand. You want to recruit the best players possible and as many of them as you can get your hands on. The reality is slightly more complicated. The process of sorting through recruits and choosing which tactics to use on them is inherently overwhelming. Once you start trying to actually get those recruits to your school (especially a smaller school), the whole thing can feel impossible.

The truth is that recruiting the best players in EA Sports College Football 25 is a matter of time, patience, and understanding both your needs and players’ needs. Once you understand the very basics of the process, though, here are some slightly more helpful tips and tricks you can rely on.

Choose Your School Carefully

As you probably already guessed, big schools with prestigious histories will have a better chance of regularly recruiting top players than smaller struggling programs. Alabama and LSU are going to have a much easier recruiting process than Sam Houston State, and there’s nothing you can do to change that out of the gate. 

However, the recruiting difficulty mechanic is slightly more subtle than that. For instance, if there are two schools of relatively equal size and success but one plays in a bigger and better stadium, the school with the bigger and better stadium will likely have an easier time wooing top recruits. Similarly, small schools in big conferences will have better recruiting odds than small schools in small conferences. If you’d just like to pick a small program and see how far you can take them, be aware of these subtle differences and how they’ll affect the recruiting process. 

Strangely, one of the most important inherent recruiting attributes a school has may be their location. That is due to the way recruitment pipelines work in EA Sports College Football 25. 

The Best Recruiting Pipelines

Successfully recruiting players in EA Sports College Football 25 comes down to a variety of factors, but few of them are more important than your pipeline. 

Your recruitment pipeline is basically the advantage you gain when recruiting players from specific regions of the country. So, if you have a coaching pipeline to recruits from Georgia, players from Georgia will be more likely to sign a commitment to you. Pipelines are far from the only recruitment factor, but they do offer a way for any school in the game to gain a natural advantage regardless of additional recruitment factors. 

Technically, a great recruit can come from any area which means that all pipelines are viable. However, these are the best overall recruitment pipelines in EA Sports College Football 25:

– East Texas

– South California

– Metro Atlanta

– South Florida

– Louisiana 

Those pipelines tend to have an advantage due to the size of those regions, their football history, and their likeness to produce more recruits as well as better recruits. This is also why the location of your school matters. If your school is closer to a rich pipeline area, then you have a better chance of fulfilling any “Proximity to Home” requests your targeted recruits might have. If you’re a small school near South Florida and there is a top prospect from that region who wants to stay close to home, you will have an advantage over some of your competition. 

That’s why it’s important to ensure your coaches are tapped into a variety of pipelines across the biggest regions. If you have a coach with a bad pipeline trait that isn’t cutting it in other areas, that’s all the more reason to consider replacing them as soon as you can. 

However, that’s not the only way you can utilize (or abuse) your coach’s attributes. 

Use (And Abuse) Your Coach Abilities

Coaches with high recruitment skills will obviously have a better chance of helping you recruit top players than coaches with lower recruitment skills. That’s all the more reason to either prioritize hiring coaches with better recruitment abilities or invest early upgrade points into that attribute. 

Before you pursue the latter option, though, consider what you’re looking for, especially in your first year. For instance, if you desperately need a new running back and there is a top running back prospect that year you have a realistic shot at, then invest points into your coach’s running back recruitment abilities. That will help you secure top prospects in areas of need early on, which will help your recruitment in the long run. 

That said, investing points into Offensive Line and QB recruitment can be a viable strategy regardless of needs. Why? Well, a great QB can draw better prospects by greatly improving your chances of winning, and the offensive line perk affects all OL players regardless of their specific position. The same is true of other player groups, but OL players tend to be especially valuable in the short and long term. 

Scouting and Dealbreakers

Scouting is as important to the recruiting process as recruiting itself. Not only will learning more about a player make wooing them easier, but the game has a nasty habit of making busts look like five-star recruits and hiding superstars behind one-star ratings. Nothing feels worse than investing all of your recruiting resources into a bust. 

However, the most important thing to monitor when scouting players is their Dealbreaker. As the name implies, a Dealbreaker is a condition that will determine a player’s recruitment decision regardless of every other detail. If you can’t meet that requirement, you need to ignore that player and move on. 

At the same time, that aforementioned “Proximity to Home” Dealbreaker can be a big advantage for you. If a top-ranked player wants to stay close to home and isn’t near one of the major school pipelines, you have a great shot of recruiting that player even if you are a smaller program that is near their home.

Use All of Your Recruitment Hours Every Week

Technically, EA Sports College Football 25 does not refund the hours you spend on recruiting players week to week. That means that you have a finite number of hours each week to spend on your available recruitment tactics. If you use all of them in the first week, you won’t automatically get them back.

However, you should still spend every recruitment hour available to you every week. Why? Well, while those hours are not refunded, they are recycled week to week. So, if you already invested time recruiting a player, that player will have the same amount of time spent on the same recruitment tactics on their profile the next week. The system is designed to help you expedite the recruitment process and ensure you don’t need to make manual recruitment selections every week for every player. 

The catch is that those points can either be manually refunded by visiting a player’s profile or automatically refunded if that player signs with any school. So, there is no reason not to go all-in with your hours as soon as possible and adjust that strategy based on 

Steal Recruits After Week One

Tired of the general tips and looking for some ways to game the system? Who can blame you? Well, there is one reliably sneaky way to take advantage of the recruitment process. 

The basic idea is to prioritize your two and three-star recruits during the first week of the recruitment process. These players will form the heart of your team, and you should prioritize those in this range that exceed their expectations based on scouting. You probably won’t face nearly as much competition for these recruits early on, especially if you’re offering scholarships and aggressively pursuing recruits in that range whose interests rely on your own.

During week two, look for any four and five-star recruits that have not yet been received an offer from any schools. For some reason, the list will likely be filled with such recruits. From here, you will want to pursue your most aggressive recruiting strategies to target those high-value recruits. It’s great if you can fill a need with them, but targeting absolute stars regardless of position is a viable approach at this point in the game.

It seems that the game works on a quantity logic at times rather than focusing on pure quality. Basically, schools don’t always pursue the top-tier recruits that would fit their needs. Because of that, you can snatch them up before they get better offers. Realistically, the only recruits you’ll miss out on by waiting a week are those that you weren’t likely to sign anyway. By using this method during your first couple of years at a smaller school, you’ll build the team and resources required to eventually become competitive with larger schools at the start of the recruitment process.