We've hammered out a high-level plan for overhauling recruiting and I want to start getting some feedback from you guys. 

First off, here are the problems that I see with the current system:

1. Elite schools have too much advantage, with the combination of prestige and extra recruiting money.
2. There is not enough battling going on for the top recruits, most likely due to the belief that elite schools can't be beaten and the fear of losing that money.
3. The status of your school related to a recruit can be confusing and hard to track due to vague messages.
4. Some battles last until the end of recruiting, leaving the losing schools in a bad position.
5. There are not enough schools willing and able to recruit outside of their region.
6. Scouting players is rudimentary and frustrating.
7. Player decisions come down mostly to money spent (assuming other factors are fairly equal), making it a glorified auction system. 
8. Recruiting takes place at the beginning of the season, which is tough for new coaches, who haven't had a chance to learn the game.
9. Due to the benefits of postseason money, there is way too much cooperation between teams in the same conference.
10. SimAI teams are pretty terrible at recruiting, leaving many undesirable rosters.

The ideas we've come up with should address all of these problems to some degree. 

One big change would be to extend recruiting throughout the entire season, where signings would take place later in the year and recruits would not show up on your team until the following season.  This would allow time for a more in-depth experience and give coaches something else to do besides game-planning during the season.

The first half of the season (give or take a few days) would be used strictly for scouting players.  No actual recruiting would take place during this period.  Around the mid-point of the season, coaches would start actually recruiting players.  Signings would start a little time after that, and it would probably extend to the end of the season, possibly with an extra day or two after the championship game to finish things up.

I'll start up some threads for discussion of various topics with more details so we can keep things more focused.

Thanks to everyone for all the feedback on the upcoming recruiting update.  I'll continue to monitor the discussions, but I have enough to get started now.  I'll continue to provide updates of my progress in the Development Blog thread and will probably start a few more discussion topics and polls along the way as I dig into all the details.

Rather than try to keep up with all the threads that have popped up, let me just state it here once.

I am not ignoring the feedback.  In fact, I've already made several design changes based directly on the feedback.  I will continue to read as much as I can in the forums.  When I need feedback about a specific part of the update, I'll start a new thread to allow for discussion.  Nothing is set in stone at this point.  I have enough to start working on the basic framework of the update, so I'll start doing that now. 

I fully expect some things to change as we're beta testing and issues are uncovered.  I'm not going to stubbornly stick to something if the majority of feedback indicates the opposite.  I want this to be a collaborative effort where we can get a finished product that makes as many people happy as possible. 

Please don't jump to conclusions about things that may be unclear or not fully developed yet.  We'll have time to address problems and come up with a solution.

I un-pinned the threads from the original discussion of the update. You can still get to them here using the links below. However, some of the information in those discussions may no longer be accurate.

Scouting: https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=488367
Recruiting: https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=488470
Schedule: https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=488446