College Football 27 Dynasty Recruiting: Build a Smart Commitment Plan
Recruiting is one of the most important systems in Dynasty mode in College Football 27, because you can’t count on keeping every player after the final whistle of a season. Instead of reacting at random, you need a clear idea of which commitments are coming due and who you plan to replace. Top prospects are often snapped up quickly, so if your program is trying to be one of the “big sharks” of college football—or wants to become one—you’ll need a recruitment plan that’s built to last. Here’s how the process works, what to do each week, and how to avoid wasting your limited scouting and influence resources.
How Does Recruiting Work in College Football 27?
Recruiting is how you add new players to your program and improve your roster either immediately or for the future. What matters most is your school’s AD Expectations. If your goals are short-term and your fanbase expects results now, you’ll likely want to prioritize quick wins. If your program can afford patience, long-term development tends to make more sense.
Recruiting is split into two areas: Prospects and the Transfer Portal.
Prospects are young players who haven’t signed with any school yet, while the Transfer Portal is for recruits who are already playing elsewhere. The Transfer Portal only becomes available during the offseason, which happens after the End of Season Recap. Prospects, however, can be targeted both in the offseason and during the regular season.
Even though these options appear in different tabs, the recruitment flow is basically the same. Start by selecting players who you think fit your team and your budget. Also verify that your program’s current statistics match the player’s Dealbreaker, because that factor heavily influences how willing the player is to consider your school.
Each school also has a list of roster needs by position, shown at the top of the Prospects or Transfer Portal tab. If that need list isn’t listed as an AD Expectations objective, you aren’t required to follow it.
There’s a cap on how many players you can target, which is usually around 35. As you continue recruiting, some prospects will stop considering you (locking you out). Removing them from your target list frees up slots for future weeks.
After you finish selecting targets, return to the Recruiting Board tab. This view shows which rival schools are also recruiting the same players, and your ranking can influence how the prospect evaluates your program over time. As the process advances, you need to reach the player’s Top 5 and Top 3 lists. After that come Verbal Commitment and Hard Commitment.
Scout First: Manage Your Weekly Hours
Before you can make strong decisions, you should check a player’s ratings. From the Recruiting Board tab, select the prospect and open the Scout section. This is where you spend time uncovering a player’s attributes—potentially for hours.
You receive a weekly hour budget for scouting, so it matters how you spend it. In most cases, it takes 3 to 5 scouting sessions to fully reveal a player’s stat profile. During the first scouting attempt, you’ll see a range for each attribute.
It’s a good idea to focus on the attribute ranges that matter most for your build, and only continue scouting when you’re satisfied that the range works for your needs. Each scouting session costs 10 hours. Because of that, completing a full reveal for every targeted player can quickly drain 30 to 50 hours.
Recruiting Actions, Explained
When you pick a target and move to the Recruiting tab, you’ll see multiple actions available. Start with offering a scholarship. This is also where you choose your offered NIL while reviewing the player’s expected NIL. If you offer above or below the expected amount, the interface will show green or red indicators, respectively. These visuals represent whether you’re gaining or losing influence each week.
NIL is only one way to gain influence, but it’s an action you can adjust. Each week, you can reduce or increase your offered NIL. If you’re already the top school for that player by a wide margin, you can typically lower your offer without dropping your rank. If you’re not, you can sometimes raise your NIL to boost influence and push yourself to the top—though doing that can come with a tradeoff in team prestige.
On the first attempt, the best baseline is to offer the expected amount and then rely on other actions that don’t require Dynasty Points. The reason is that if you offer more than expected, it becomes the player’s new expected NIL. So if you later reduce the offer back to the original expected amount, the game can treat that change as a negative influence swing.
Plan Your Week: What Costs Hours and What Doesn’t
You have only 50 hours you can spend on a single player each week, so make every action count. Each recruiting action has its own hour cost. Use the list below to plan your week:
- Offer Scholarship (5 Hours)
- Search Social Media (5 Hours)
- DM the Player (10 Hours)
- Contact Friends and Family (25 Hours)
- Send the House (50 Hours)
- Schedule Visit (10 to 20 Hours)
- Sway (30 Hours)
- Soft Sell (20 Hours)
- Hard Sell (50 Hours)
Some actions are locked behind a milestone. Schedule Visit, Sway, Soft Sell, and Hard Sell only become available once you reach the player’s Top 5.
Also note that Schedule Visit doesn’t consume the player’s 50-hour cap; it uses your personal hours balance instead. That means even if you’ve already spent the full 50 hours on that player, you can still schedule a visit afterward.
Understand Influence: Timing and Opponent Results Matter
Different methods produce different influence amounts, and the impact varies from player to player. In general, the higher-cost actions tend to matter more. Schedule Visit influence is especially variable. If the visit happens on game day, the outcome of your match and the tier of the opponent can significantly affect how much influence you gain. If you lose that game, the visit influence can turn negative.
Sway, Soft Sell, and Hard Sell work like mini-sequences where you talk to the player and focus on what your school does well. Each option brings up a menu of topics. The goal is to select a topic that gives you three “ticks” for the strongest influence. A two-tick topic still improves your situation, just not as dramatically.
You can edit your actions as the week changes, similar to how you adjust NIL offers. Every week you can remove some actions and replace them. The player’s total 50-hour cap stays the same, but you can reshuffle your plan to chase better results.
Top 3 Is a Power Spike—Save Hours for That Window
As the weeks progress, the overview tab for each player updates your position. When you reach the Top 3 period (where only three schools remain), the top team at that stage receives a higher influence multiplier for their actions. That’s why you should reserve hours for each target so you can spend them during Top 3, when every action is more valuable even though it costs the same amount of resources.
During Top 3, the team leading has already earned the Verbal Commitment, but that doesn’t guarantee the player will sign. Other schools still have a chance to increase influence using stronger actions. The recruitment ends when a school earns the player’s Hard Commitment.
Your Team Prestige Is Your First Limitation
Choosing targets realistically is the key to getting the most out of your recruiting window. If you’re coaching a two-star program, you shouldn’t realistically chase five-star prospects. Even if you offer a large NIL, most elite prospects won’t choose a low-ranked school. And if they somehow do, you’ll still be paying that NIL year after year—optimistically—just to keep them on the roster.
Instead, aim to stay within one star above your current program prestige. It’s fine to offer a scholarship to a three-star prospect while you’re sitting at two stars. That range is typically much more workable.
Don’t Ignore Roster NIL When You Sign Players
Every signing affects your finances in the next season. Any player you add increases your Roster NIL budget for the following year. Some players will leave after each season, but if you overspend during recruiting, a major portion of your next year’s budget can be swallowed by Roster NIL costs.
The bigger problem is retention. To keep players in your program, you may end up raising their NIL even more each season. If your school doesn’t improve in the key grades, or if you miss the player’s Dealbreaker expectations, your only option becomes offering an extremely high NIL just to retain them. That’s a risky habit in Dynasty mode, because it can have serious long-term consequences.
Don’t Miss the Preseason for Scouting
During the preseason, you can’t offer scholarships to prospects, but you can still add them to your target list and scout them. Preseason is the best time to use your scouting hours since you aren’t spending time on recruiting actions yet.
Scout as many options as you can in the preseason, then keep your favorites on the list. In the following weeks, apply recruiting actions to those chosen targets using your refreshed weekly scouting time budget.
