Playing as Iowa. 2nd season-was pretty easy to get #1 recruiting class and a preseason #4 ranking. After a few weeks, I changed to hard mode. Not sure what parts of the game would be affected but was really looking for a bump in recruiting difficulty. Recruiting did seem to settle in to a more realistic level but not sure what happened to current roster. Team did a 180 and began being blown out by far inferior teams. I play games by setting the strategies, depth charts, play calling and let the game sim so my involvement in the game's outcomes didn't really change.
My assumption is that "hard mode" strongly affects both recruiting and on field gameplay. Would be very helpful to have separate recruiting and gameplay difficulty settings instead of one overall difficulty.