I believe the game pause had a significant unexpected consequence on recruiting in Smith. After the first new process time this morning, literally every single Top 100 recruit who had not yet signed, and every non Top 100 recruit that I had scouted that had an offer who had not yet signed, all signed at the 5am ET first signing opportunity. It would appear to me as if the algorithm treated the paused days as counting toward likelihood of signing by a given period, thus making it either 100 percent likely to sign or nearly that likely at that session instead of the normal likelihood.

I have submitted a ticket and am awaiting a response, but if anyone else has any insight, it would be welcome.

Must be random. I see guys that aren't signed in my scouted players pool.

Guys that have scholarship offers from DI or DII schools? It does appear as if the DIII barrier remained in tact.

After further review.... I think you may be right. It didn't affect me, so I didn't pay attention really. Nice catch if it's true. I know that a second cycle has processed now. So i'm not sure if players signed then. But it does smell a lil odd I guess

Got this response from CS:
You're probably right in that recruits' tendencies are based on time since the start of recruiting. I'm not sure how to correct that at this point without resetting things, which would be very problematic.

That's a fair response. I do agree with what you stated tho after I examined everything a little bit. But I don't think it was a crippling factor.

The first day of RS2 was complete. So all Early and EoP1 signers were gone. Late signers usually start signing around day 2. Not ALL of them all the time. But the time frame wasn't off (its not as if late signers were signing in RS1 or something). It probably affected coaches that took a new job the most. And as far as whenever signers, well that's self explanatory.

Overall, it's odd. And probably was some sort of "issue" that happened. But I agree that's it's too complex to do anything about, and really wasn't that big a deal.

Could have had a bit of an impact in terms of preventing teams from going after backups that might still have been available if they lost out on a battle. Also could have impacted some battles to the extent that it gave some teams less time to commit effort. Personally, it probably slightly increased my chance of winning the one battle I was in because it potentially gave Arizona less time to spend more AP and increase their likelihood, but we both lost out to Oregon anyway (who probably also slightly benefited due to potentially giving Arizona less time to spend more AP).

Pretty sure there was a glitch with the unpausing of the game last week.

I was in Smith, so we're mid recruiting session 2 (not the beginning of session 2, but in the middle of it). I had around 30-35 players on my board i was targeting, some had late signing tendencies and some had whenever. And every single one of them signed in the first cycle after the game unpaused - except for ones that had a DIII with high enough interest to prevent that or those not offered a scholarship at all. And i mean there were literally no exceptions.

It hit me hard and left me with an extremely low depth on my roster... I can't predict the future, but it feel like it did set me back a season or two as a rebuilding program.