CFB 26: Stop Wasting Recruiting Hours On Visits In The Transfer Portal

UPDATE: Because of this research, this has been patched and no longer applies! Transfer portal visits now matter and you should absolutely schedule them. See our latest study.

One of our most interesting case studies in College Football 25 uncovered that if you schedule a visit during a bye week or a game you lose, you receive no positive impact whatsoever for that recruit.

That is another study we plan to do this year but early indications are that it works the same way in CFB 26 as it did in CFB 25. Today, we are focusing on how impactful recruiting visits are during the revamped transfer portal.

I’ll jump to the conclusion at the beginning: visits have no impact whatsoever on recruiting influence during the transfer portal. It doesn’t matter if you are pitching an A+ dealbreaker with 3 complimentary visits. You will see no recruiting gain. So don’t waste your hours on visits.

I know this is kind of hard to believe, but we did five different tests, all showing the same result.

The testing is a pretty straightforward process that you’re welcome to confirm on your own. Here’s how to confirm it on your own if you don’t trust our research:

Step 1: Create an offline dynasty and sim to the first transfer portal.

Step 2: Find a recruit that you are in 1st place for (ideally by a significant margin)

Step 3: Do your regular recruiting process (Hard Sell, Send The House, etc).

Step 4: Create a manual save point before you advance the week.

Step 5: Advance the week and take a screenshot of the recruit’s influence bar the next week (without a visit).

Step 6: Back out of your dynasty and load the manual save point. Keep everything else the same and now also schedule a visit for that recruit.

Step 7: Advance the week and take a screenshot of the recruit’s influence bar the following week with the visit completed.

You’ll notice there is no difference whatsoever.

You can try a bunch of variations of this test in a few minutes. Schedule different complimentary visits and competitive visits, schedule visits with different grades, etc. You’ll notice the same result every time.

Here are a few screenshots of one of the tests we did, just so you can see it for yourself.

This is a 3 star recruit that we are in 1st place on. We are in week 2 of the transfer portal and took a screenshot here to document the baseline influence bar this recruit has.

We did two scenarios. One with Send The House and one with Send The House + a visit.

First, we’ll show you this recruit’s influence bar after the visit (we scheduled an A+ dealbreaker as the visit activity).

After the week 2 visit, you can see on the right side, there is no impact in the “Action Summary.” If you compare the recruiting influence bar to the one below (with no visit), it will look very similar.

The screenshot above shows how just Send The House (with no visit) gets us to the same place.

You can compare the influence bars in the two screenshots. Every time we tested this, the result was the same.

What this conclusively means is that you should never spend your recruiting hours on visits during the transfer portal. Even if it is just 10 hours, it is still wasting hours and not advisable.

I know the temptation is there to do everything you can for some of these elite recruits but no matter how you look at it, scheduling a visit during the transfer portal will have no impact.

What this very likely means (although we haven’t yet confirmed it) is that visits during the regular season work exactly the same way they did last year. Scheduling a recruit for a bye week or a game you lose will likely provide no increase in influence whatsoever. That is a test we’ll do soon!

Because visits have no impact whatsoever during the transfer portal, that makes quickly diagnosing the correct hard sell that much more important. Our CFB 26 Recruiting Insight Engine helps figure out the correct hard sell when you have very limited information, which can often be the case during the four week transfer portal.