A coach should be able to tell his assistant not to evaluate a discovered player when he's sent to scout previously discovered players. Instead of leaving a player unmarked or color coded, there should be an X that says I don't need to know more about this recruit.

Thoughts?

With scouting the way it’s set up, I think that makes the assistant too powerful of a tool. If you want to target certain recruits (or exclude them, as you suggest, which is in essence the same thing), it needs to be expensive, and that’s what your personal scouting does. Camps and FSS are cheaper, but you have no control over who shows up in your pool that way. The assistant is designed to be the bridge between the shotgun and the rifle approach, you have more control over the content of the pool (selecting radius, positions, etc), but it’s a little more costly.

Years ago, I thought it might be a good idea to let the assistant tether a radius to a certain location away from your campus - say 500 miles from Salt Lake City, when scouting recruits for UConn. But now I think that also makes the assistant too powerful (with the setup and cost as is), for the same reasons, so I’m glad the powers that be didn’t listen to me.

I still think the best idea for recruiting is adding the hiring of an assistant coach. You hire them on a 6-season contract and you can choose to hire:
1) A recruit's parent - gives you a significant boost in recruiting that player (50% bonus?).
2) A state scout - gives you a decent boost in recruiting players from that state (10-15% based on state population).
3) A regional scout - gives you a small boost in recruiting players from a region of the US or internationals (3-7% based on region population).

That would add a fun new dynamic to recruiting. Do you make sure you get that 5-star recruit at the cost of filling your assistant coaching position for longer than the recruit will play for you? Do you hire the local scout or try to give yourself an extra bonus on far-from-home recruits? Do you know that several other programs will have their hiring this season so you save yours until next season?

Besides the difficulty of adding this feature to the code, the devs would also need to balance the bonus % for each option which would take a lot of work. States like California and Texas would need to be lower than most other states, or everyone would pick them. This is just a fun idea for the future.

That would be interesting. I will also through the idea out there of being able to use resources to keep guys from the Big Board (Early Entrants) around instead of them leaving to the draft. I know that I have had underclassman leave early only to get a second round draft pick and would of been glad to use resources to try and keep them around longer to improve their draft pick which could benefit the prestige too (obviously would need to be high enough). I think the easy thing would be allocating AP to try and recruit/sway a player back (only during the recruiting period) and coaches would then have the option to try and bring guys back/recruit new pieces. Then in situations where maybe teams lose battles but don't have recruiting $$$ then could use AP points to try and convince a guy to stay.