What do you believe the value to be of these guarantees? I have submitted a ticket for this in lieu of a recent battle, which I believe I should have won, given what information I have gathered, and will post what I find out later.

Just wondering what the understood knowledge is from those who have been doing this for a while.

for me it seems to be almost a 80% or so guarantee they will sign with you, (starts holding more value than minutes) INLESS somebody else (higher prestige) has offered the same thing

The forum wisdom will put it somewhere between a home visit and a campus visit, though some have it as slightly more than a campus visit.

Few people seem to believe it is as important as zbolton1 indicates.

I think it should carry a lot more weight and breaking the promise should have more of a penalty, but that's not the way it is now.

I think there should be a range of effects - some players should care a TON about these and some should care only about the current level.  More texture for recruiting would be good.  AND, variation would be a way for lesser teams to compete better by making promises to guys who really care about that but are not quite good enough to get a promise for an elite school.  

At D1, promises don't carry near enough weight. As zbrent said, they are probably somewhere on the order of a campus visit. IMO, promises should not be worth a fixed value, but should be a multiplier to other efforts. If you promise a start/significant minutes, there should be a 10-15% multiplier to all other recruiting efforts, or something along those lines. While starts/minutes should be worth more than they are currently, we need to balance things so that promises don't unduly overwhelm all other efforts. Do that, and it becomes too much of a cheap magic bullet.

That's a pretty good idea there professor.

Posted by professor17 on 4/20/2013 9:42:00 PM (view original):
At D1, promises don't carry near enough weight. As zbrent said, they are probably somewhere on the order of a campus visit. IMO, promises should not be worth a fixed value, but should be a multiplier to other efforts. If you promise a start/significant minutes, there should be a 10-15% multiplier to all other recruiting efforts, or something along those lines. While starts/minutes should be worth more than they are currently, we need to balance things so that promises don't unduly overwhelm all other efforts. Do that, and it becomes too much of a cheap magic bullet.

So are you saying starts have different weights at each level? Also, is a start worth more at an A- prestige or a C-, or equal?

The value doesn't change for different divisions. What professor was referring to was the fact that its value is relatively lower at D1 because of the much higher recruiting budget. At the D3 level a battle might include 4 campus visits (just an example). In that scenario if you add a promised start, if you consider it roughly equal to a campus visit then that amounts to an additional 25% on top of the effort you already put in. At the D1 level a battle could end up being something like 30-40 campus visits. In that case the relative value of a promised start is much lower in relation to all the other effort.

And as far as the value at different prestiges, all effort from an A has more value than from a C. That is where the prestige multiplier comes in. If for example the difference between an A and a C was 2x (again just an example) 1 campus visit from the A program would be equivalent to 2 from the C program.

Posted by theploww on 4/21/2013 2:01:00 AM (view original):
The value doesn't change for different divisions. What professor was referring to was the fact that its value is relatively lower at D1 because of the much higher recruiting budget. At the D3 level a battle might include 4 campus visits (just an example). In that scenario if you add a promised start, if you consider it roughly equal to a campus visit then that amounts to an additional 25% on top of the effort you already put in. At the D1 level a battle could end up being something like 30-40 campus visits. In that case the relative value of a promised start is much lower in relation to all the other effort.

An increased budget is definitely something I wasn't considering. So, effectively, the multiplier should be the equivalent of how much more each division gets per open scholarship, no?

I think what he's saying is that a promised start or minutes would just be a multiplier on top of the other effort. It wouldn't change by division. So in my examples above, at D3 you had put in 4 campus visits, with a 15% multiplier it would come out to 4.6 campus visits worth of effort. For the D1 example of 30 campus visits with the 15% multiplier it would be 34.5. Using this method rather than a set value would allow the relative worth of the promise to remain consistent across all divisions.