Recruit predictably

[TerpsFan]

I am pretty new to this game and am really enjoying discovering its depths. The one area I have been frustrated by is the unpredictability of the quality of recruits. Recruiting is a key aspect of a game like this, and I definitely appreciate that it is an inexact science and that scouts assigning ratings to players on the roster are also imperfect.

But, the unpredictability of how a recruit will translate to a player can be frustrating. I started playing as a small school, was happy to bag one of the top ranked prospects who showed interest only to find that he had worse ability and ratings than anyone else on my roster.

My longest game has been with Maryland, and after having top 5 recruiting classes for 4 seasons, I've noticed that about half of A overall recruits in the top 20 in their position are fantastic, while the other half aren't even decent backups. I've recruited 3 highly ranked power forwards (2 As and a B) in consecutive years and have a walk-on starting. And it's not as if the scouting on my team is inaccurate. In the games these guys are awful. Sometimes they have big potential ratings, but I've never seen a player improve by more than .5 stars in a season so the 1/5 guy is the same as the 1/2.5 guy. I get that prospects are often busts but given the depth of the recruiting detail it can be frustrating. I want to try to play as a low level school, but I am concerned that recruiting is just a roll of the dice because it is impossible to distinguish actual quality. Sorry for the rant. Are there certain qualities during recruiting that predict whether a recruit will be good once they get on campus? I think camp performance is a good predictor. I thought athleticism would be one, but many many top 10 overall recruits have F or D for athleticism. Thank you for any advice. I really do like this game. It is so addictive.

[Wayne23]

1. At a small school both your scouting and recruiting abilities as a head coach, as well as those of your assistants, are pretty inaccurate. As you gain experience your ratings will go up and the accuracy will improve. If you get a job at a better school, where you can afford to hire better assistants, that will help as well. I rely more on the national rankings (Magazine and WSSN) than I do on my or my assistants' judgments but yeah, at a small school it's a crap shoot.

Welcome, and keep asking questions. It's a great game.

I'm finishing off my current association where I'm at the top. The next one will start me off at a very low ranked school.

[PointGuard]

While there definitely is a level of uncertainty, I don't feel recruiting at a low-prestige school is really so much a "crap shoot". I find that while some recruits don't pan out, a greater number are generally close to what you would expect. And I think the level of uncertainty isn't really out of whack with what a real-life coach at a low prestige school encounters. He tries to get the best recruits he can and some work out and others don't while others just take a couple seasons to mature and develop. I'd suggest you continue to play and gain familiarity with recruiting, and I think you're opinion will moderate and your frustrations will lessen as you do.

[NCAAhoops]

Another thing that I'll point out is if your players do not preform well on court make sure you are running plays that cater to your players strengths. I coach at a middle of the road school and I often over preform on the court because my players have high ratings in the offense and defense that I run. Just recruiting a hi level recruit isn't all there is to it you have to run offense and defense that works for your players which I think is a lot of reasons teams under preform for human coaches.
For example, I look at a rookie card as soon as they are on my team and see what he already has some ratings in, usually they are only 10 but this is a clue of what he will be good at later on with practice.
I have two power forwards my backup is much better than my starter at 2-3 zone offense so I start him against teams that play 2-3 zone a lot and he gives me an extra edge against the zone in scoring as I'm not a very good 3 shooting team and he will give me 8-15 points. But play him in other situations and he is just a run of the mill backup 0-6 points.

I think a lot of people immediately change the offense and defense practice and usage as soon as they start an association but do not have the players to do it and the players have no proficiency in those changes as well. This will cause poor play on court and then the losses pile up and you have player relationship issues and things start to snowball. Look at what your players are proficient in and run and practice that. If you want to change the style of play to what you prefer I do it slowly over the first year sometimes two. Its like in real life if you are a new coach of a real NCAA team and they were pretty good inside before you were hired and poor 3 shooters and if you change and say well we are going to shoot 3's 70% of the time and run and gun, your that team will struggle a year or two until you recruit the type players you need to run that offense. If you think about it most real life coaches get 3 years to implement their style of play when hired. Some succeed some fail. Same here.

[PointGuard]

Excellent comments, NCAAhoops!!!

[TerpsFan]

Thank you all for the replies. I will try to look at the tactics in particular. I set them to match my players in the first two seasons and then just kind of left it. This game is very deep.

I was looking at real life 5 star prospects from the past ten years and the vast majority of them (~80%) were high level college players (and pros) apart from injuries and eligibility issues, so I do feel like having them show up on campus as "1" rating players happens a little too often, but I can definitely see how smaller school recruiting would be extremely unpredictable in real life. I guess it just goes against my expectations of gaming logic, basically that success at recruiting=better players, but it isn't that simple.

Are there factors in recruiting that you look at to predict whether a player will be as good as projected? Maybe the mental aspects like hard work? I'll be paying attention in the future. Guys in the top 10 at indy camp have all been elite 4.5+ freshmen while top prospects who didn't stand out at the camp have mostly been very bad. Top 25 guys at the camp are usually in between (~3.5).

Also the "best" freshman I ever had wasn't actually that good. He shot under 40% from the field for the season and was a high volume shooter. He made up for it by dominating on defense and getting to the free throw line, but it goes to show that a good player can hurt the team if not utilized correctly.

[23Zone]

Another way to get some information is to look at who else is recruiting them if you have that information. I usually play as a mid level team... I find low level teams to frustrating and high level teams too easy.... so I usually have a few top 100 guys interested right away. If I get great scouted ratings on a guy I notice who else is on his school list. If its a bunch of no-name schools I tend to downplay my scouting and wait. But those lists change a couple of times during the recruiting and sometimes other decent schools show up on the list. That is when you know you might have something. Then I go check to see if its possible that school would really want him by looking at how many scholarships they have open and their situation. This really helps if you are past the initial signing period because some schools will show up on a recruits list that don't have any more scholarships open... then you can ignore them. Its just another way to get some info.

[ZorbaGarp]

I'll just use this opportunity to voice my minority dislike of the whole scouting rating thing. I much prefer a strategy game where I am challenged on my abilities and I make strategy decisions based on the knowledge I have. But with my knowledge skewed by scouting ratings, I'm playing blind. It's like playing chess blindfolded without awareness of where my opponent's pieces are on the board.

There, I said it. Now I'll go back to playing the game because I'm still addicted despite my frustration!

[Your_Imaginary_Friend]

I'll just use this opportunity to voice my minority dislike of the whole scouting rating thing. I much prefer a strategy game where I am challenged on my abilities and I make strategy decisions based on the knowledge I have. But with my knowledge skewed by scouting ratings, I'm playing blind. It's like playing chess blindfolded without awareness of where my opponent's pieces are on the board.

There, I said it. Now I'll go back to playing the game because I'm still addicted despite my frustration!

Exactly. As I've posted before, we should have a very good idea of the current abilities of the recruits. It is potential which is debatable. The game has us watching recruit film week after week and we go to see them in person almost as often when that is available. It seems to me the game contradicts itself here. If we spend all that 'in-game time' watching them, we should know their current level pretty well.

[PointGuard]

I understand the desire for predictability and a level of "certainty" and realize there are a lot of DDSCB players on either side of this issue.

But I think that the game's portrayal of "uncertainty" is a good reflection of life. There are those who are high school stars who just don't make it at the Division 1 level. They look and play great in high school and may have all the potential in the world, but their delivery (for any number of reasons) when they begin playing with the "big boys" just doesn't match the hype. And there are those who are good, but not great, players at the high school level who mature and bloom when they get to college. And...college head and assistant coaches have biases, get inaccurate information, and make evaluation errors all the time.

There are games I like and play where I know and can expect player performance (e.g. an MLB sim game where I know Mike Trout will be a great hitter) and the level of "uncertainty" is much lower, but I've become hooked on DDSCB (and therefore play the other games less) because with DDSCB I can't always accurately predict how recruits and players will do. So recruiting, while not a crap shoot, is an educated guess. More often than not I'm right, but...