Never Change A Recruit’s Position In CFB 26 – Here’s Why

There is a huge hidden cost to position changes within dynasty mode. Even the most mundane position changes like left guard to right guard or left edge to right edge result in completely tanking a recruit’s skill caps and development potential.

If you read nothing else in this article, the key takeaway is to never change a player’s position in CFB 26. It doesn’t matter whether it is in the offseason Position Changes stage or by manually going in and changing the player’s position. If a player’s position is changed, his development will tank.

This was originally called out on the NCAAFBSeries subreddit by the user, JerryRice88. He noticed that some of his Elite/Star development recruits randomly had huge skill cap restrictions that didn’t make a lot of sense logically. He dove in and noticed the problem.

To help articulate what is happening, we’ll go over 3 example recruits with screenshots.

Let’s start with a freshman right tackle that has Elite development.

Once he is signed we create a manual save point in our dynasty so we can come back and change his position later. For now we will leave his position unchanged.

When we get into the season and can view his full player card, we notice he is an absolute stud with 0 skill caps blocked anywhere.

Now let’s go back to our manual save point and switch his position to left tackle and look at his skill caps in the new season.

His overall rating stayed the same but he now has 35 skill caps blocked off. This was a 5 star recruit with Elite development who now has the potential of a 2 or 3 star recruit.

If you changed this right at the position changes stage, you would never know how much potential you just cost your recruit.

The same thing happens for any position change. We’ll illustrate a few more.

Here is a Star development, 78 overall right edge rusher.

Here’s how his skill caps look without a position change. Only 6 are blocked off.

If you were to do a pretty boring change and move him to left edge rusher, all of a sudden you now have 37 blocked off.

Or we can take another example:

This is a 5 star Will linebacker with Star development.

He has a total of 3 skill caps blocked out if we do not change his position.

If we simply switch him to Will linebacker, now he has 35 skill caps blocked out.

These players will never reach their potential. If your 5 best offensive linemen are all left guards, you are significantly better off leaving them all there and playing them out of position as your 5 starting offensive linemen in the depth chart.

Next up: Check out our predictive recruiting tool for CFB 26!