A Deep Dive into Dynasty Recruiting
EA Sports reveals a revamped recruiting mode that will be pivotal to building your team into a powerhouse.
Among the greatest appeals of the old college football video games was dynasty mode, which allows players the chance to build up a program of their choosing into a national powerhouse. One of the main features of the game mode was the recruiting system, something that is returning with a vengeance in College Football 25 when it releases on July 19.
In a “deep dive” into dynasty mode released Tuesday morning, EA Sports dropped tons of details on its flagship game mode, from conference customization options to coach archetypes and skill trees.
Here’s a look at everything we learned about recruiting from the new information.
Staged recruiting
Convincing players to join your school in the last EA Sports CFB release — NCAA 14 — was a fairly streamlined process. You would have a certain amount of recruiting points to allocate to different prospects, and usually the more points you invested, the better chance you had at signing a player.
In older games, recruiting was mostly broken down into three phases: preseason, in-season and offseason. There will also be three stages to recruiting in College Football 25, but it will look different from what you might be used to.
The discovery phase, the initial step of the new recruiting system, is for coaches to quickly uncover base-level information about prospects to see if they would be a good fit at your program. You will learn certain areas of importance to a recruit — playing time, proximity to home, brand exposure, etc. — and from there start narrowing down your targets.
The pitch phase comes if your team is in a prospect’s top five schools. Here, you will be able to “sell” certain aspects of your program to further entice recruits. You will also have the opportunity to sway prospects who might have locked you out earlier in the process.
Finally, in the closing phase, you can schedule a prospect to come in for an official visit, and the benefits (or disadvantages) you receive from said visit will be determined by a number of factors, including opponent strength and if you’ve scheduled any complimentary visits (i.e. a quarterback and receiver coming the same week).
Real-world influence
College Football 25 is taking inspiration from real-world trends when it comes to talent dispersion among prospects. Certain regions throughout the country are known for producing more consistent, high-level talent, such as quarterbacks from Southern California or receivers from East Texas.
A player’s hometown could also impact what type of player they are within a given position. For example, receivers from East Texas are usually more physical, while those from South Florida are known more for their speed.
EA Sports also looked at real-life data to implement a new pipeline system in College Football 25. Based on recruiting classes of the past 10 years, the developers have created a tiered ranking system to show how well a school recruits in a given area. There are five pipeline levels you can achieve for a given area, and a higher pipeline level will give a boost to your pitches to players from that geographic location. You will also maintain your pipeline level in a certain location for the duration of your dynasty.
Part of making College Football 25 as accurate as possible to real life was also properly implementing the transfer portal. And there is plenty to consider when trying to take advantage of the new system.
The transfer portion of recruiting will be four weeks and will take place at the beginning of the offseason, according to EA Sports.
Bringing in highly-touted transfers is a quick way to bolster the talent of your roster, but the transfer portal can just as quickly turn your program from conference power to middling pretender. Like recruits, players on your roster have a “Dealbreaker” that carries over from when they first joined your program. If, during the course of a season, your grade in a certain area such as conference prestige or pro potential falls below a certain threshold, it could be the deciding factor in whether or not a player leaves your school.
Coaching staff changes can impact a school’s “Coach Prestige” grade, and seeing their offensive coordinator jump to another program might be enough to convince players to look for greener pastures. If a player decides to leave, you will have a limited number of opportunities to persuade them to stay, and the difficulty in doing so will be determined by their overall rating and your prestige as a coach.
Player development
During the recruiting process, you will be able to scout prospects to find their ratings in certain key statistical areas, but you won’t truly know how special a player can be until National Signing Day.
In total, there are four player development traits — normal, impact, star and elite. Players designated as “normal” will progress at a steady rate over the course of their careers, while “elite” players could potentially grow into all-time greats.
As far as attribute progression, players won’t have to raise each individual aspect individually. Instead, EA has designed a new progression system based around skill groups. Now, you can upgrade a collection of related attributes at one time. For example, raising your “power” skill group as a running back will increase your ratings in trucking, strength, stiff-arm, etc. Skill group levels can be capped based on a player’s potential, but there are certain coach skills you can acquire to bypass those restrictions.
As detailed by EA previously, players can have up to five special physical abilities and three mental abilities, which are broken down into four tiers: bronze, silver, gold and platinum. You can think of these similarly to how NBA 2K handles badges.
While physical abilities can be upgraded over time, mental abilities cannot and will be set once a player comes in as a freshman.
Jeremy Vernon is a Featured Columnist for Four Verts: An EA Sports College Football 25 Substack. He also writes about the MLS and NWSL for Field Level Media, and his previous stops include Sporting News and MLB.com. You can follow him on X @jbo_vernon and on Twitch @jbovernon. When he isn’t working, you can likely find Jeremy at the dog park with his two-year old lab mix, Summer.