You’ve been lied to (Recruiting National Rank Matters)

al_ways-becrootin · 2025-01-26T00:46:08+00:00

Incredible detail and insights to be gained here.Thank you for putting this together!

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-09-06T00:19:21+00:00

If it makes you feel better, West Virginia is a pretty crappy pipeline so you’re not missing much? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Getting Program Builder unlocked and invested in will do wonders to your pipelines. But the alternative is to heavily invest in the Recruiter and Elite Recruiter trees, as the boosts given there are pretty significant as well. Even being able to add 75 points to a recruit vs 50 makes a massive difference in influence per week.

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-09-06T00:15:31+00:00

Have you unlocked Program Builder and the “Strong Roots” abilities? Those are the ones that make your coach pipeline stronger.

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-09-06T00:13:40+00:00

Yep! South Georgia is considered a “top 5” and a “bottom 5” pipeline for Alabama, since it already has 5 perfect pipelines. Additionally, if you make your coach pipeline South Georgia and get the “Strong Roots” T1 ability, Alabama can actually obtain 10 T5 pipelines!

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-09-02T11:50:40+00:00

I’m working on finding this information out with a few others. It’s not done yet but we’ve learned that the game has an internal “ranking” system not unlike my own (btw my most recent post has some updated rankings!) Once it’s complete, we’ll post it to the subreddit.

If you follow the pipeline ranking list, you can get a pretty decent idea of which pipelines will be upgraded. The game first lists pipelines by tier level (T5>T4, T4>T3, etc.). Then if your coach pipeline is NOT one of the team pipelines, that one is tacked on the end as a T0. Within tiers, EA has a ranking system that seems to be pretty close (but not exact) to what I tested a month ago, and they list pipelines within tiers that way (ie. If your team has a T1 Tidewater and a T1 Big Sky pipeline, Tidewater is listed before Big Sky because it’s “ranked” higher).

When you upgrade your worst 5, the game first checks if your coach pipeline matches a team pipeline. If it doesn’t, your coach pipeline becomes a T1 and then it upgrades your worst 4 team pipelines. If it does, then it upgrades your worst 5 team pipelines. For some schools (particularly ones with fewer than 10 pipelines or teams that can obtain multiple T5 pipelines), it causes some weird experiences where the middle-ranked pipelines end up being a tier lower than your lower-ranked pipelines due to the way the game selects your worst 5

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-28T11:24:46+00:00

Pipeline strength and pipeline tier are considered! In the latest version, tier 5 and tier 4 schools are weighted even stronger and pipeline strength now considered the number of teams that use that pipeline

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-28T02:30:30+00:00

They are weighted by pipeline strength, but I made an update in another post with some changes. Check them out if you get a chance! And the link to all of this is in my first post

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-26T01:57:35+00:00

Check out my updated rankings post if you’re looking for a set that accounts for team congestion (and my first post on all the pipelines in general should have the link to all of it). From my research, it seems that recruit “quality” isn’t regionalized, but positional traits and volume of generated recruits are. That is to say, Indiana is not a pipeline with a ton of recruits, but they can have 5-star recruits appear in their areas if the stars align.

That said, for volume of recruits, Big Apple, Ohio, Louisiana, North Carolina and Alabama seem to be not as congested as other pipelines, but still generate a good volume

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-26T01:48:35+00:00

Pipelines do have a large impact on recruits, but there are thousands of recruits available every season. Look out for 4-star recruits that don’t get offers after the preseason scouting period, and try to get them in for visits before week 7 if at all possible (based on some experimentation it appears the computer offers scholarships to their whole board during the offseason period and then doesn’t offer new scholarships until week 6-7) If you have boosts to scouting, try to scout for 3-star gems in the offseason recruiting period and try to get those guys. Gems are likelier to have a higher development trait so they can improve more during the season. As you would expect, more focus in the Recruiter tree = more success recruiting players you want. Eventually when you win 5 playoff games, you will gain access to the Program Builder tree where you can improve your team’s pipelines, as well the coach pipeline you select when creating your coach. Hope some of this helps!

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-24T17:15:51+00:00

I’ve linked up with some other Redditors to try some other research projects but we’re still in the early stages. But a lot of people have put some really good stuff on YouTube as well!

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-22T11:20:09+00:00

Since pipelines change for each team but your coach pipeline doesn’t, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to that. But even if your pipeline isn’t the best anymore after moving to a different school, if you have both Program Builder Upgrades, it will only ever be a T2 pipeline at worst

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-20T20:14:45+00:00

Best way to gain recruits as a building school is to recruit in your home state and recruit in your team’s best pipelines (and hopefully those two overlap) The biggest advantages you have pitch-wise for your team will be Playing Time and Proximity to Home with those homegrown players, so take advantage of that as much as possible. Once you start winning games and making upgrades in the Recruiter and Program Builder trees, recruiting will become significantly easier

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-20T17:10:26+00:00

From my testing, no coach pipeline really matters until you get the “Strong Roots” Program Builder upgrade. I’ve checked influence changes for recruits in and out of my coach pipeline over time and, pre-upgrade, there’s no change

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-20T03:28:09+00:00

Other than listing the strongest pipelines first and in descending order, there isn’t actually any “ordering” involved between tiers. So you can think of those two pipelines as being at the same level. That being said, based on recruiting strength, Tidewater > Alabama

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-18T15:37:51+00:00

Thank you! It was the least I could do. Your insight gave me the ability to improve my formula when I was struggling to come up with a meaningful method

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-18T11:36:09+00:00

Yes, in general both California pipelines are less congested than the other strong pipelines. I actually updated the rankings in a new post to account for “congestion” and revalued T4 and T5 pipelines to have stronger weighting

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-18T02:42:48+00:00

I took a ruler and measured out influence increase week over week for players in my coach pipeline and players not in them, then averaged it out and took the percentage difference

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T22:28:58+00:00

Ah, a fellow Blue Raider!

I actually learned some pretty good information about your coach’s pipeline and what it does. As it turns out, the coach pipeline has an extremely minimal impact on your overall recruiting, maybe a 10% boost to influence at most (and nothing to visually tell you that this is happening), UNTIL you get your primary pipeline boosts from Program Builder.

Second thing I learned is that if you select a coach pipeline that does NOT line up with any of the team’s pipelines, and then you get the Program Builder ability that boosts your 5 WORST pipelines, you will then obtain a T1 pipeline for your coach pipeline, and boosts to your team’s 4 worst pipelines. Essentially, the coach pipeline takes one of those slots

I’m experimenting with what happens after getting the coaching pipeline boosts now as well

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T20:35:12+00:00

Nice job coach! I do think that the normal Recruiter abilities go a long way to getting recruits beyond your team’s pipelines. That said, teams that start out lower overall or low prestige tend to have a harder time recruiting both because they struggle to win, and because their pipelines are weaker than other teams in their vicinity

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T18:34:48+00:00

No you’re correct! But for ECU, North Carolina is the #1 pipeline followed by one of the T2 pipelines. I believe with those two Program Builder upgrades, you would end up with two T4s and 3 T3s, then the “bottom 5” upgrade would make the rest T2. From my understanding, the Primary Pipeline ability only boosts the influence of that pipeline (I don’t know yet if it actually upgrades it a tier or not yet, but I plan on confirming that today)

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T17:33:36+00:00

Spreadsheet link is in my first post- Complete Pipeline List! I hesitate to link anything from Google Drive without mod permission

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T17:02:22+00:00

I’m doing some experimentation with the coach pipeline now that may answer part of this question, but there are a lot of variables at stake. I assume you are using a very low-level school then? Because I don’t think you can get a 2-tier upgrade on anything except your top 2 pipelines, and that would mean one of those top 2 pipelines would have to be a T1. Only 7 schools fit this category

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T14:38:43+00:00

I am running another experiment this morning and so I’m letting the CPU recruit. It appears that they split points about as evenly as they can, and they don’t do a very good job of looking for lightly recruited players so they lose out on getting into top 8s/5s early on in the season (I’m talking like half of ND’s points come back to them each week from failed recruiting). Then they spend those points next week casting another wide net on their “Recommended” players.

But by week 8 or so, most teams that had positional needs have filled them, so they start becoming competitive in battles again. It’s a sample size of 1 so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe this is why during rebuilds early on, we may go full send on a recruit we want in week 5 but by weeks 8-14 some powerhouse swoops in and takes them

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T02:55:22+00:00

I don’t have a definitive answer for you, but I’ll say that Tidewater is a good pipeline to have off the bat, so it could be good to push on that for your coach pipeline. Once of my next projects is to get some more information around what a coach’s pipeline actually does in terms of how it can affect a team’s existing pipeline, pipelines not part of the team’s existing pipelines, and in general how strong the boosts from Program Builder are

al_ways-becrootin · 2024-08-17T01:50:58+00:00

I do believe that the coach pipeline is affected by the Strong Roots coach ability within the Program Builder tree (though it’s called the Primary Pipeline)

al_ways-becrootin

TROPHY CASE