Recruiting is the most important skill in College Football 25’s Dynasty mode. Here’s how to land five-star recruits in CFB 25 and what to do with your hours.
Dynasty mode is one of the crown jewels of EA Sports College Football 25, thanks in no small part to its incredibly detailed, complicated, and intricate recruiting system. Nothing is more important to building a college football powerhouse than the talent you’re able to bring in year in and year out, but recruiting the best players in the country isn’t easy, especially if you’re trying to bring a smaller school within striking distance of the playoff picture.
To help you build the CFB champions of your dreams, we’ve put together a list of tips for how to level-up your recruiting game and land the best prospects in the country in College Football 25. Study your Team Needs spreadsheet
It’s entirely possible to track your roster’s shortcomings by hand, but thankfully College Football 25 doesn’t make you do that kind of work. Instead, you should spend a significant amount of your recruiting time in the Team Needs spreadsheet — which you can find by pressing the right stick while in the recruiting menu.
This screen will let you know which positions you’re currently light at, and which ones you’ll need more of because you’ve got exiting seniors or players expected to declare for the draft. It will also let you know how many players at each position you’re targeting on your prospect list, and how many you’ve already got committed this season. You shouldn’t feel limited to only recruiting positions of need, but they should be the first bases you cover each recruiting season, and they’re particularly important in the offseason when the Transfer Portal rears around (more on that later). —AGFocus on the big fish early, but don’t get your heart set on them
The early fall is time for hope in football programs all across the country, both for a better season than the one before, and for all those five-star recruits that barely paid your program a passing glance. You get more hours in the pre-season than you will the rest of the year, so take big shots. Send the House for the five-star who has you listed 8th, and gamble on any high-quality recruits you can. While the chances are probably slim, you might get lucky with a couple of players who happen to match your program just right.
But hope isn’t a guarantee, so it’s best to have a backup plan. While you may land the player of your dreams, especially if you’re at a bigger school, the chances are good that most of the 5-stars are going somewhere with a little more prestige than your burgeoning dynasty can muster just yet. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t chase them for a while. —AGFind the prospects other teams missed
My current Dynasty file is with New Mexico, which starts as a one-star program. That means there are very few four-star prospects who will even give me the time of day (and even fewer five-star prospects).
In the preseason stage of recruiting, I follow the advice above: Find every four- and five-star prospect that will even listen to me, and offer scholarships to the ones I would want on my team. By the time the season starts, most of them end up off my board, because they’ve been offered by bigger schools that I simply can’t compete with. But this also leads to the crucial part: Identifying the best prospects that bigger schools overlooked
It’s actually pretty easy: In Week 0, I filter prospects by “five-star recruits” and “four-star recruits,” respectively, and then sort it by offers received. (The format for this column is Y for if you’ve offered the prospect, N for if you haven’t, and then their number of total offers in parentheses – you’re looking for a 0 there). Every single elite recruit without any offers is getting an offer from me.
Using this strategy, I’ve been able to land at least four four-star recruits in each of my three recruiting classes at New Mexico.
