Back in July, we did a study that showed scheduling visits during the transfer portal had no noticeable impact on getting recruits closer to committing to your school.
This oversight was patched in September, and we wanted to make sure we did a quick article highlighting that you should absolutely be scheduling visits for recruits both during the transfer portal and during in-season bye weeks.
As always, we did a bunch of tests on this and will highlight our findings with a few examples.
First, let’s cover the impact of a visit during the transfer portal.
We simulated this test two ways: First as a baseline with no visit, and then using the same baseline and adding an A+ visit.
Here are the results:
The first image (below) shows the baseline without a visit.
You can see a solid gain in the influence bar, but it is dwarfed by the second image (below) that does the same thing but with a visit.
With the visit, you get a huge boost to the recruiting influence bar.
The takeaway here is that you should absolutely be scheduling visits during the transfer portal window again.
Next up, let’s look at in-season bye week visits. In CFB 25, scheduling a visit during a bye week resulted in no influence gain.
This year, there is a slight gain if you schedule a good visit during a bye week, but you are still much better off scheduling a visit on a week where you play a game.
We did basically the same test as above, keeping everything the same, adding a visit during a bye week, and recording the impact.
We pitched this player with a non-dealbreaker A+ graded motivation (so ignore the change in the dealbreaker grade between the two images).
Below is his weekly influence gain with no visit during an in-season bye week.
And then you can see in the next image (below) the recruiting influence bar gain after a successful visit while keeping everything else the same.
We are definitely much closer to the “Top 3” window in the second image.
The takeaway here is that if a bye week visit is your only option, it is now worth doing but you still are much better off scheduling a visit on on a week where you are playing a game.
Particularly, you want to schedule the visit for a game that you expect to win – but we’ll cover that in much more depth in a later article.
