My 2nd season at Ball State and Recruiting is going much better than the 1st. Obviously the school leveled up quite a bit because we only lost one game the first season, but I think I've figured out a few things about recruiting too.
For one, I'm doing "Send the House" or whatever in the beginning, along with either DM the Recruit or Scan his Social Media so I can figure out what his Ideal Pitch is (The 3 green checkmarks). Sometimes you can get 2 and guess the third using process of elimination. Once I've figured out his ideal pitch (And hopefully my school is a B or better in at least 2 of the 3) I switch to Hard Sell and just spam that. It's allowed me to get to some early leads, at least with recruits that I was already in their Top 8, and then sometimes an Early Visit will lock them up quick. Sometimes you don't even need the visit. I was able to get one player to Auto Commit during Preseason because I was their #1 school, but this doesn't always work, it probably has a 10-15% success rate like the old game. In the old game you could game the system a bit with those if you reset the game after offering a Scholly, but that doesn't work here as it saves right away. After some testing I was able to get the Sway option to work if the new Ideal Pitch included at least one of his previous green checkmarks, but it sometimes took a few tries to get it to work. I never got it to work if there wasn't at least one green checkmark. Felt like a bit of wasted time, it's almost better to just spam Hard Sell as long as you have at least 2 of the 3 checkmarks at a decent grade.
I only ended up with 15 total recruits my first year at Ball State, partly because I refused to recruit anything less than 3 stars. I'm halfway through my second season though and I'm already sitting at 10 recruits with 3-4 more ready to commit any day. I'm getting a number of 4 stars too. It definitely helps to go after kids in the Pipeline, especially if you Pipeline is at 3+. It helps greatly if they're already interested before you begin the process (I didn't have any 3 stars interested in Ball State first season since they were so bad, so I had to do more reaching). If a kid isn't interested at first it'll take at least a week or two to get on his radar, more if he's being sought after. You can definitely still pickup kids that fall through the cracks throughout the season, but I noticed that the CPU will sometimes pick up the slack and start recruiting them hard once you do. The CPU also has a tendency to go for certain positions and player types early. Deep Threat WRs get recruited first, then Possession, and Physical WRs are often forgotten. Power HBs are often forgotten too. Blocking TEs get overlooked. Also, but not always, the CPU will avoid dud players (Broken gem). A "dud" 4 star player is still pretty good for a building program like Ball State of course. I have seen once where a "Gem" player got overlooked, but it doesn't happen often unless it's a player type that's undesired like the Physical WR.
Oh, and for those that are building lower programs, the available Total Hours you can commit to recruiting all recruits goes up as your school's Prestige increases. For a 1 star Program you get 350 hours, but a 2 star Program gets 450. I haven't been able to unlock the Elite Recruiter tree yet because it requires you to sign two Top 5 classes, which is honestly a little ridiculous. I imagine it might be difficult to do that given the hour restrictions until you reach a 4 or 5 star school.
From season 1 to the beginning of season 2 the team jumped from 71 Overall to 81 Overall when you factor in Recruiting, Transfers, and Training.
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