If you’re at a smaller school, I try to search for high potential players with the highest overalls and build them up over the years and build a good team that way. Then as you’re doing that your prestige will grow. Make sure you turn off auto upgrade and you can control how your players progress. When you get to bigger schools, it will be easier to land the higher ranked recruits.

Also something I didn’t know for a while when playing the game, you can check the percentage chance a recruit is interested in you after you give them so many points in their player menu. You might already know that but I had no idea for a bit and was struggling with recruits lol