One of the easiest ways to get your recruiting class off to a good start is to get a few instant commits in the pre-season.
A quick refresher for those of you who are unaware: If you are in first place on a recruit there is a chance that when you offer a scholarship that player instantly commits to your school. Usually this happens in the pre-season recruiting phase but it can technically happen any week.
This chance exists with or without purchasing the “Dream School” coach ability within the CEO coaching tree.
Today we will be testing if that ability is helpful and if so by how much.
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Methodology and The Usual Caveats
Those of you who are consistent readers know this part already but it is important to be clear upfront about what we did, what we didn’t do and potential problems with our experiment.
We offered approximately 800 scholarships to recruits using Georgia. We choose Georgia because their coach has the CEO – Dream School (instant commit) ability active.
To keep things as consistent as possible we only offered recruits who had a tier 5 pipeline and that we started first place on.
We offered 200 4 star recruits and 200 3 star recruits with the normal in-game Georgia head coach that has the Dream School ability.
Then we did the same thing with a new, freshly created level 1 coach.
One potential obstacle that we didn’t account for is that the default Georgia coach has a couple of recruiting skills for defensive players that our freshly created new coach didn’t have. That could slightly influence the outcome of this experiment.
Also, it is important to remember we only added recruits to our board who we were first place on. It isn’t normal for a recruiting class to only recruit players who already have them in first place from the start of the season.
4 Star Recruit Experiment
On the 4 star recruits we offered when we had the CEO – Dream School ability activated, we saw an instant commit percentage of 21.4%. Meaning about 1 out of every 5 4 star recruits that we offered (when already in first place) instantly committed to our school.
When we switched over to a freshly created coach who didn’t have the CEO – Dream School ability, we saw an instant commit percentage of 8.8%. That is very roughly 1 out of every 10 4 star recruits that we offered instantly committed to our school.
This 12.6% difference is statistically significant to us.
To put it a different way, out of 35 4 star recruits who you are first place on you should expect around 4 instant commits with a normal coach. With a CEO Coach with Dream School activated, you would get about 7-8 instant commits per season.
3 Star Recruit Experiment
We did the exact same test with 3 star recruits and 200 scholarships offered on each side.
We found that 3 star recruits are significantly more likely to instant commit than their 4 star counterparts.
On 3 star recruits with the CEO coach, we had a mind blowing 46.4% instant commit rate.
With a normal coach, we still saw an impressive 34.3% instant commit rate on 3 star recruits.
Just like with the 4 star recruits, we saw an increase of around 12% in our 3 star instant commit rate with the CEO ability active.
Takeaways
There are a lot of different things you can take away from this experiment.
The most straightforward takeaway is the CEO Dream School coaching skill gives you somewhere around a 12% bonus to land an instant recruit in the pre-season.
It is also true however, that if you are a good enough coach to have the CEO coaching archetype unlocked, you are likely at a dominant program, with strong pipelines all over the country, and you are already first place on a recruit. I think there is an excellent case to be made that you will likely win the recruiting battle for that recruit anyway. Whether it is in Week 0 or Week 7 doesn’t matter to0 much in the grand scheme of things.
That brings us to the final, and most important takeaway: The huge savings in recruiting hours that you can then re-deploy into other recruits.
On a standard 35 player recruiting board, a 12% increase in instant commits locks gets you an extra 4-5 commits right from week 0. That is 4-5 recruits that you don’t have to spend any recruiting hours on. Spending those hours on other recruits can make a noticeable impact.
Next up: Save a bunch of time recruiting with our CFB Recruiting Insight Engine.
