Now that we've got our full roster of players, it's time to head into the preseason. I had a number of decisions to make in the pre-season, but the most important area to cover off was recruiting. As every fan of the NCAA Football series knows, this is the first chance to see the recruits that are out there and add prospects to your team's recruiting board. Let's take a look at some of what I've found out about our recruits.
My School
To compete with other top schools in the nation, you want to see your school highly ranked in all of the areas recruits tend to care about. I left the Orlando Raczillas with the default set up of the powerhouse template, and that means they are really good at almost everything. It might seem like it will make recruiting easy, but here's the thing... I decided to put this team into the SEC replacing Kentucky, so they're competing with some pretty tough schools in both their conference and their state. Hopefully the top prospects know to choose the Raczilla's over the Gators.
Team Needs
I always like to recruit the best players available, but it's also important to recruit for need. Here's a look at our team on both sides of the ball. Fortunately there aren't a lot of areas with really pressing need so we'll be able to go after the best talent instead of trying to fix weak areas.
Top Recruits
Here's a look at the top 14 prospects in the nation.
Recruits interested in the Orlando Raczillas
And here are the players in the top 100 who are already wisely considering joining our squad.
Matt Wright
One of our best prospects so far is Matt Wright, the top ranked cornerback in this year's class. He's got a lot of potential and is a hard hitter, which I love, but we're competing with two other top Florida schools to get him. More on Matt Wright next week as we dive into recruiting and our week 1 game against Notre Dame!
What's next?
I'm going to try and get to the next post ASAP (I'm traveling this week but I'll give it a shot!). Let me know what questions you have and what your thoughts are about recruiting. Do you think I should be going after certain players? Are there specific kinds of players I should search for? Are there players in that top 10 for whom you'd like to see more stats? Let me know.
You'll also want to follow me on Twitter as I've been talking back in forth with fans to help make decisions about the schedule, playbooks, etc. I might even have time to do some live recruiting via Twitter when I'm back in the office next week, so look out for that and send me some questions and comments in the mean time!
-raczilla