One of the🦩 fantasies sports video games let us live out is that of the star player, dominating on the field and living a life of l🥃uxury off of it. In the world of college football, however, it can be even more exciting to take over as a coach, turning a small program into a juggernaut or winning multiple championships with an established contender.

College Football 26's Dynasty mode lets you tackle this challenge headfi✃rst. The road to sports immortality will require🅠 surrounding yourself with the right pieces, so hit the recruiting trail with a vengeance. Here's how to land all your favorite prospects.

How To Pick Your School

If you want a leg up when recruiting top prospects, you'll want to start at a prestigious program. Look for the nationally ranked schools (they'll have a number next to their logo) and examine their star rankings.

Powerful teams will attract many of the best players, who look to win championships, build their personal brands, and develop into future NFL𒁏 stars.

Coach Backstories, Explained

Before you begin your dynasty, you must decide what kind of coach you want to be. You can take over an existing coach's career, or create your own.

If you decide to make a new coach, you'll be given a choice between three different backstories: Motivator, Recruiter, and Tactician.

All have their own strengths and weaknesses, but Recruiter will be the best one for pursuing top players. You'll receive a buff to scouting that allows you to better evaluate prospects, and you'll land more due to increased persuasiveness.

Another part of coach creation you'll need to consider is your pipeline. This is the area of the country you will be focused on, and you'll be given a recruiting boost whenever you speak to players from that region.

The best pipelines wi൩ll generally be located in the southern United States (Texas and Florida, especially), although California and the East Coast are also worth investigating.

It may be wor🅠th picking a pipeline geographically close to your school, since you'll be able to satisfy local talent that wants to stay close to home.

How To Add Prospects To Your Board

You'll get access to your recruiting menu as soon as you begin Dynasty. You can view your team's needs above the prospect list, giving you some insight into how many players you need to add to your team. Add your desired targets to your recruiting board (you can have up to 35) and begin pursuing them.

We recommend filtering players by Top Prospects (Right Trigger), then by any positi😼on group you need to fill (Left Trigger). From here, sort by Interest to see if any players already have your program in their sights.

How To Recruit Prospects

Once you have set up your board, you have a few options. In the top right, you'll find your Hours, which you can spend in different ways. Scouting will gradually reveal a prospect's ratings, allowing you to gauge whether they are worth your time.

Some may reveal a gem icon. This symbolizes that their stats are beyond 𓆉what their initial star rating suggests, making them an incredibly valuable addition to your squad.

You can also begin wooing prospects through a variety of actions, such as interacting with them on social media, reaching out to their family, or pulling out all the stops by sending the house. You're only able to spend 50 hours on a prospect per week, but using these tactics is essential to staying in their good graces as the weeks tick by.

It'🐭s really important to give attention to your favorite players, since you can be comp🔜letely locked out of signing them if you don't make it into their top eight, top five, and eventually top three schools.

Scholarships are another great way to show a prospect you mean business. You only get to hand out 35 a year, and they function as an official offer from your university.

Selling Your School And Scheduling Visits, Explained

As the weeks progress, athletes will eventually settle on their top five universities. At this point, you can begin using more advanced methods of persuasion, giving a recruit a soft or hard sell to gain large influence boosts. These require you to pick the correct sales pitch to be successful; choose the one that aligns with their motivations for the best results.

Soft sells are better when you don't know all of a player's interests, since the penalty for being wrong is le🌺ss severe than a hard sell.

You can also attempt to sway a player if you know some of their motivations. This lets you approach the recruit with a pitch, and potentially convince them to value the corresponding aspects of your school more.

Success is dependent on what motivations of theirs you have already revealed, and choosing a pitch that aligns with a few of them will increase your chances of the sway working. If it goes through, you can then hard sell that specific pitch in the following weeks for a better influence gain.

Finally, you can begin scheduling school visits with your prospects. These visits will coincide with some of your games, and you can only assign a few visits to each date.

Be mindful of which players you have coming to each game, since complementary visits will boost influence, and scheduling prospects competing for the same job may hurt it. You'll also select an activity for each player to do, based on their motivations.

Do not try to sell, sway, or schedule a visit with a player too early. You learn more about their motivations as the weeks progress, and you want to pickಌ a sales pitch or activity that matches them. Trying to engage with a prospect before all their motivations are laid bare can be risky and will potentially ruin your chances of landing them.

How To Use The Transfer Portal

The transfer portal has become an integral part of the college football landscape, and thus its inclusion in Dynasty mode is a no-brainer. You'll get access to it once you reach the offseason, where again you can add players to your recruiting board, although this time, they'll be other college athletes.

Recruiting works the same as it does for high school prospects, though on a much more condensed timeline. It's encouraged to be aggressive, so send the house on any four or five-star athletes you need added to your team, and then begin the pitching process. After a few short weeks, you'll have a host of new players for your squad.