The Science Behind Whether To Hard Sell A Recruit In CFB 25

Choosing the proper recruiting strategy can be the difference between landing a generational prospect and missing out entirely.

Today we’ll be focusing on how to allocate a standard 50 hour weekly recruiting allotment. Specifically, when it makes sense to use the 50 hour “Send The House” option versus when to use the 40 hour “Hard Sell” option combined with the 10 hour “DM The Player” option.

CollegeFootball.gg Tools Used In This Article

• CFB 25 Recruiting Insight Engine
• CFB 25 Hard Sell Calculator

The Short Answer

The short answer is it comes down to your school’s grades for a recruit’s 3 green check marks. If you have good grades for the 3 green check marks, you should always hard sell. If you have bad grades, you are better off continuing to send the house and forgoing hard or soft sells.

The threshold we use is about a C+ average between the 3 grades. If the average of your 3 grades is C+ or better then always hard sell. If it is C or below, then you are better off continuing to send the house.

Math can be hard so we put together a tool that does it for you.

Here are a few examples:

Scenario 1:

First Grade: A
Second Grade: B+
Third Grade: C-

Result: Hard Sell

You average those 3 grades and you are somewhere around a B which easily meets our threshold of an average of C+ or above.

Scenario 2:

First Grade: B+
Second Grade: C
Third Grade: D-

Result: Send the House

Because the 3 grades in Scenario 2 don’t meet that C+ average grade threshold, you are better off continuing to use your 50 hours on the “Send The House” option.

That’s the quick and easy version.

The longer version includes a bunch of the testing we did to confirm that this is the correct approach to take.

From our testing, we’ve pulled out 3 real recruiting scenarios to demonstrate how this works and how big of an impact it actually makes.

Hard Sell With 3 Good Grades

Let’s start with a scenario where you have 3 really good grades.

Note: For our testing, we kept everything consistent by either always winning the games played that week or always losing the games.

In the above screenshot we have a recruit with grades: A+, B+, and A-. If you average those out it is somewhere in the “A-” range so we know it makes sense to hard sell.

Take note of where the progress bar starts so we can see this recruit’s baseline interest level the week before we spend our points.

For the purposes of this example, we will instead first use our 50 hours on “Send the House,” then sim a week and check the results.

After spending 50 hours on “Send The House” we can see that we are definitely making progress on this recruit.

Let’s now compare that to a scenario where we instead used our recruiting hours to choose the correct “Hard Sell” (40 hours) with good grades and “DM The Player” (10 hours).

By analyzing the 3 images, you can see a noticeable increase in this recruit’s interest level! If it is hard for you to compare, you can see the progress bars (on top of each other) from the 3 images below.

This was only from 1 week of simulating. If this goes on for multiple weeks, the difference will only continue to get more and more pronounced.

But this is a common sense result. Of course hard selling with good grades makes a bigger impact than sending the house.

Hard Sell With 3 Bad Grades

Now let’s take a look at hard selling a recruit with 3 bad grades.

Here is a different recruit whose grades are: D, C, and F. That averages out to a “D” grade which is below our C+ threshold to hard sell.

So we know spending 50 hours on “Send The House” will be better than “Hard Sell” + “DM The Player.”

Even so, let’s walk through the example. Take note of the recruiting progress bar in the image above to see where this recruit starts.

We spent 50 hours on “Send The House” and you can see how it really significantly improved this recruit’s progress bar.

Alternatively, when we spent 50 hours on the correct “Hard Sell” + “DM The Player” we notice that this strategy did not work at all.

Here are the 3 progress bars next to each other.

It is very clear that we would have been much better off just sending the house on this recruit.

Hard Sell With 3 Decent Grades

Our last example is one where it is just on the borderline. This recruit has only 2 visible grades but we were able to use our CFB 25 Recruiting Insight Engine to determine the 3rd grade.

So even though only A+ and D- are shown, we know the last grade is “Brand Exposure” which is a C-.

Our general rule where we try to see if the 3 grades average to a C+ is too close to really know one way or another. So we have to use our CFB 25 Hard Sell Calculator to know for sure.

The calculator tells us to Hard Sell so we know that is the right move.

Even so we’ll take a look at what spending 50 hours on “Send The House” look like.

You can see a nice increase in interest by selecting send the house over our original baseline interest.

But we have to compare that to the interest if we were to use those 50 hours differently.

You can see how tight this one is but if you look closely at this recruit’s progress bar, it did in fact make more sense to hard sell the recruit instead of sending the house.

It isn’t as big of a jump as when you have 3 really good grades, but it still makes a real difference after just 1 week. Over the course of a few weeks it will add up to something meaningful.

Other Ways To Get a Similar Result

There are other ways of figuring this out most notably from Max Plays CFB on YouTube. His formula is to convert each letter grade from A+ to F into a numerical value.

An A+ gets 13 points, an A gets 12 points, an A- gets 11 points, and so on all the way down to an F that gets 1 point. Once you’ve done that you just add up your 3 numbers and if you get a total of 19 or more you hard sell. If you have less than 19 you continue spending your recruiting points on Send The House.

Even so on 95% of recruits you’ll be able to clearly tell by just eyeballing it and then on the rare case where you don’t know you can just use our CFB Hard Sell Calculator.

Next Up: Check out our CFB 25 Pipelines Database to easily sort and search through every pipeline in the game!