Recruiting Insight Engine

You start by choosing whether you are recruiting “In Season” or in the “Transfer Portal.” Then select how many stars the recruit you are targeting has. Then you click the Yes/No checkboxes based on the information from the game.

A pitch highlighted in green indicates it is a pitch that is possible given the information you have on a recruit. If a pitch is not highlighted in green, it is not the correct pitch.

You will see a percentage displayed on each green box that changes as you input more information into the system. This number indicates how likely it is to be the correct pitch given the information you’ve given us.

You will see a percentage on each box that is highlighted in green. That number simply represents how likely it is to be the correct recruiting pitch.

The Recruiting Insight Engine uses a Bayesian Statistics model.  We combined the in-game recruiting logic with data collection for over 3000 recruits.

The accuracy of our Recruiting Insight Engine can be judged in two parts.

The first part focuses on the pitches highlighted in green. That is 99.99% accurate (functionally 100%). If a pitch is not highlighted in green, it is not possible for that pitch to be correct.

The second part focuses on the percentages overlayed on the highlighted pitches. Those numbers are a little less precise but we are confident that they are no more than 2% off.

Percentages for 5 Star, 4 Star, and 3 Star recruits will be significantly more accurate than 2 star and 1 star recruits simply because we gathered much more data on those higher rated recruits.

There are a few really good use cases.

First, our model automatically eliminates recruiting pitches that will never be correct (given the information you’ve inputted) but that the game indicates could be correct.

For example, let’s say you are recruiting a 5 star player and the information you have is “Yes” for Program Tradition and “Yes” for Proximity To Home.

If you were to try to figure out the options on your own, the game would tell you there are two possible pitches: Hometown Hero and Grassroots Traditionalist.  However, our model knows with 100% certainty that the correct pitch in this case is Hometown Hero and not Grassroots. This type of scenario plays out quite often.

Second, if you are in a recruiting battle for a very highly sought after player and you reach the Top 5 stage in week 2 or 3, you likely won’t have all of the recruit’s motivations unlocked.

Your choices then become to Hard Sell, Soft Sell, or Send The House for another week or two. Hard selling a recruit is far and away the most effective use of recruiting hours (given decent grades).

Our model can at times indicate a likelihood of 80% or more for a specific pitch. When that is the case, it may make sense to risk it and hard sell with 80% certainty. If you are correct, you will get a huge leg up on your opponents’ recruiting efforts.

Congratulations on reading this far into the FAQs! Here’s a little reward for you:

Yes, there is some slight variation between positions and archetypes but not enough to make a noticeable difference with one major exception.

Every wide receiver recruit that has the “Route Runner” archetype (in the in-season recruiting window) will have the “Team Player” recruiting pitch be correct. This applies to every wide receiver regardless of star rating.

The flip side of that is for 5 star and 4 star recruits that are not Wide Receivers, the “Team Player” pitch will never be correct. That means if you are recruiting a 4 or 5 star recruit at QB, RB, TE, OL, DL, LB, CB, or S that player will never have “Team Player” as the correct pitch. 3 star and below players at other positions can however have “Team Player” be the correct pitch.

This seemed like a mistake on EA Sports’ end so we didn’t code it into the engine. Other than that, positions/archetypes matter but not enough to worry about.

Almost all recruits (approximately 98%) will have “Dealbreakers” where your school needs to be above a specific rating to be considered.

Dealbreakers matter in that they are automatically one of the three motivations for a recruit. Make sure to input the dealbreaker as a “Yes” into our system as that can help our algorithm narrow down the correct pitch much quicker. Beyond that, there is no predictive power to determine the correct pitch based on a recruit’s dealbreaker.

Our Recruiting Insight Engine dynamically updates as it receives information. There are times when certain recruiting motivations are no longer possible given the previously inputted information.

When that happens, our system automatically prevents you from selecting “yes” on a motivation that is not possible.

Misclicks happen. If you clicked “Yes” or “No” on accident you can simply click the “Yes” or “No” button again to unselect that option.

Alternatively, you can scroll to the top above “Motivations” and click the “Reset” button to start over fresh.