Posted by mbriese on 5/16/2018 5:15:00 PM (view original):
I agree that schools with more scholarships have an unfair advantage right now, as they can budget around giving 1 player 80 APs per session and/or choose to go all in on more players, but flipping to the other end of the spectrum only creates a new problem.
I kind of want to pull at the "expanded process" thread - what if campus visits coincided with home games on your conference schedule, and you had to schedule visits with a player? It'd be easier to manage if recruiting started at the beginning of the season, but it'd be interesting to have to schedule a campus visit like that and have a players scheduled slots keep getting claimed as the season goes on.
At that point, there could be preferences determined by what he sees during the game on his campus visit - did your C get a lot of the distribution? Did you give a lot of minutes to underclassmen? Did you win a game in which you were the underdog? All of this could be aggregated into a grade for your visit, which provides an added layer to preferences. Just spitballing, but I'd love to see that play out.
I think the following could help narrow the gap:
1. Multi-year promises (similar to GD). You can promise a guy which seasons he will start or play X minutes (fr-so-jr-sr). Player will hold you to promises, as long as you were the coach who recruited him. This gives a C+ prestige team more of a fighting chance against a A+ team because that C+ team might be able to promise that a guy will be a four-year starter, while the A+ might be able to only offer minutes for fr-soph and starts for jr-sr. This will also help D2s and D3s prevent D1s from targeting their recruits. And the very best recruits -- guys who are likely EEs -- will expect to be 4 year starters.
2. Players getting exhausted by over-recruiting. Right now, if you have a player in your backyard (less than 200 miles), you can unlock everything, put all 20 HVs and 1 CV into a single cycle (roughly $5500), see what happens and then make a decision about whether to continue investing APs. In real life, if you did that, the player would likely get so sick of you that they would throw you out of the house. In 2.0, you had players reject home visits, where you still got charged for the amount of the visit, but gained no credit. Have a recruit's tolerance for your visits in a single cycle be tied to preferences (the more you match up with preferences, the more willing the recruit is to hear from you multiple times within a single cycle). But at some point, the recruit closes the door and won't let you in that cycle, but you are still charged for the visit.
3. Cutting players that you recruited should result in more of a reputation hit. Right now, the only real penalty for cutting a recruited player is the lack of additional resources, which isn't a huge deterrent. For me, I get a recruit to VH and then cut the current player, so I don't make a move until I've already used up the resources I had. Lets say I have a freshman who didn't develop the way I liked -- the greens turned blue pretty early on, so he didn't have the potential I hoped for. All I need to do is find a new recruit with good potential and try again; there is no downside for me. But if my reputation would take a hit, hurting my recruiting, I might choose to keep the first player around.