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

Thanks to everyone who signed up for my Team Raczilla interactive NCAA Football 10 dynasty.  I was really excited to see that so many people were interested, and while I wasn't able to add everyone to the team, I did manage to fill out the roster pretty nicely.  If you click on the thumbnails below you can see my final list for those who made the cut.  Not everyone was able to get the position they wanted (sorry!), but I did the best I could to meet all of the requests.  Take a look at the roster and congrats to those who made it!

The Roster

In terms of rating the players, I didn't switch things around too much.  I chose the powerhouse ratings template so while I'm not going to list out everyone's rating, nobody on the team is below the mid 70's and most are between the mid 80's and 90s.  I think I did ok in terms of getting in everyone's names correctly, but if you see an error don't hesitate to let me know about it.  I can't promise I'll be able to make every correction, but I'll do my best.

Shots from practice

Once I locked in my squad, I immediately wanted to try them out in practice mode.  I took a few shots of our first team practice.  Check them out!

Decisions, decisions

Now that we have our squad, I've got some decisions to make about the team before we get the dynasty started.  Let me know what you think about these items:

- What conference should we play in?  I need to choose a real life NCAA Football team to replace.  Which team should I switch with?

- Any special scheduling requests?  In addition to the teams in our conference, who are some teams we should put on the schedule?

- Which playbook should I use?

Let me know what you think and I'll get us started with an update early next week.  Thanks for following along!

-raczilla

I hope you've been enjoying our NCAA Football 10 content the last couple of months here on the Inside EA SPORTS blog.  By now a lot of you have heard about TeamBuilder, and hopefully some of you have had a chance to get on the website and create a team or two.  Today I created my very own team called the Orlando Raczillas.  A bit of a ridiculous team name I know, but I wanted to throw something together quickly that I could talk about here on the blog so all of you can follow along and participate.

What does the uniform look like? 

I went with a simple blue and white color scheme, and set myself up with a basic 'raczilla' logo for the helmet.  You won't be able to find my team on the Team Builder website because I put it up on one of our test servers, but I did take a couple of shots of the page so you can see what the uniform looks like.  Below are a couple of the combinations I created.  Click each thumbnail for the full sized image.

Try out for the team!

One of the coolest things about TeamBuilder is the ability to completely edit your roster.  Right now my whole team is full of auto-generated names, but I thought it might be fun to let some of you join the team.  If you fill out the following information in the comments, I'll pick some of the best entries to fill out my roster.  Not everyone can be picked and not everyone will necessarily get the position they want, but filling out the following as completely as possible will give you the best chance!

First Name: You may use your real first name here.

Last Name: No real last names please.  Choose whatever name you go by in the community, or I can use your login name from the comments.

Handedness: Right or left handed?

Height:

Weight:

Desired position: Put whatever position you'd most like to play, but keep in mind that you may not get the spot you want.

Special requests: You can request a certain number, skin tone, etc. here.  A lot of you may pick the same number so remember that you may not get your requested number if you make the team.  (No ratings requests please.  I'm going to try and make sure we've got a balanced team).

Why should you be picked? This part is really important.  In a couple of sentences, make your case for joining the roster.  I'll be using these answers to help select who gets in, so make them count!

If you're picked, you'll join the rest of your teammates and be featured in an ongoing dynasty report right here on the Inside Blog.  Check out a couple of screens below to see the team and our stadium.

What's next?

After I've given everyone a few days to post try out information, I'll come back and announce who made the squad and what position each of you will play.  We'll then jump right into year one where everyone here on the blog can read along and help make decisions such as who starts, what playbook to use, which players I recruit, and how much time to spend on them, and more.  I'm going to try and update this report as much as possible leading up to the July 14th launch of the game, so follow along and enjoy.

Good luck to those of you trying out!

-raczilla

Last week was the start of some great info on NCAA Football 10; we released the details on Season Showdown and then followed this week with the huge drop of TeamBuilder. If you have not seen anything about it there is a video here: What is TeamBuilder? and we are not done; expect to see even more details about Season Showdown in the upcoming weeks.

Also a couple weeks ago we released a video about Dynasty on the  NCAA Football 10 website. To be fair that video did not even come close to explaining the amount of detail that has gone into Dynasty Mode this year (and Online Dynasty).  Luckily I am able to take a little time and explain the other tuning we've been able to get done over the year. We also took a handful of screen shots to show... like so:



A lot of what was tuned for NCAA Football 10 was feedback gathered from forums and community day (held here in Maitland a few weeks ago). Before getting started I just want to say; Thank you everyone for helping us get together many of these details.

This blog is going to cover five different parts of our Dynasty Modes:

• Recruits
• Scheduling
• Poll Logic
• CPU Logic
• Progression

Ok get ready for a pretty long read :)...



Recruits have undergone an overhaul to when they are created in Dynasty Mode. We are creating a situation where you simply do not "reload" with freshmen every year and instead have to actually allow your players to grow into juniors or senior for the majority of your roster. Here is a list of what was done with Recruits for NCAA Football 10:

• Recruits will not come in as highly rated. Overall all recruits have been lowered in how high their Overall rating will be when they are created.
• Not as many "elite" recruits. Instead of the majority of recruits starting out at 80+ there will only be a handful.
• Recruits will take the quality of the school more into account when they are created. Location was too important when recruits were created in NCAA 09, going forward the quality of the school will be the most important factor. This also helps to slow down the growth of smaller schools when under CPU control.
• 40 times are more realistic - you will not see any recruits come in with a 4.19 time.
• ATH will now have more ratings to play different positions; the ratings have been redone to include attributes to make them true athletes. For example you'll find some ATH with Route Running and Man Coverage ratings that will allow you to place them at either WR or CB.

Scheduling in Dynasty has gotten a pretty major update; we've addressed a few issues from NCCA 09 as well as improved future year's schedules.

• Big East Champ no longer tied to the Orange Bowl. Previously if you won the Big East you were forced to play in the Orange Bowl (unless playing for a National Title).
• Big 12 schedule is now on a two year cycle. You play everyone in your division and then you play 3 teams from the other division for two years. In those two years you alternate between home and away. In years 3 and 4 it will switch to the other 3 teams in the other division (home and away).
• Big 10 will not have night games in November. This was a new rule put in this year.
• Arizona State always played Cal & Oregon State on the road in NCAA 09, this has been fixed.
• Additional Rotations for conferences that do not a true rotation (Pac-10 for example) now games will not be on the same date every year. For example Stanford - Cal will always be the last game of Pac-10 schedule but Stanford - Oregon will be different dates in future years of Dynasty.

Poll Logic has been tweaked to allow for more early season movement as well as taking better account for the ranks of your opponents.

• Biggest example is an unranked team beating two highly ranked teams can now become ranked.

CPU Logic has been updated in how they recruit, handle their rosters, and simulate games.

• AI after filling all their needs will begin to target a specific position. In years past they would always go after QB's and FB's now in NCAA Football 10 the CPU will select different positions to attempt to add depth.
• CPU will perform position changes. For example if they have two Right Tackles (84, 87) and one Left Tackle (75) they will move one of the RT's over to LT.
• We revisited some of the simulation logic and now less teams are going undefeated

Lastly with the changes to recruits we had to make some changes to Progression.

• With players coming in lower some stats will now progress faster. This also means ratings that did not progress in years past will now go up; for example Speed.
• Team Prestige is now a much bigger factor in Progression; the quality of your team will influence how fast your players gain attributes.
• Position Changes will no longer cause athletic attributes to go down (SPD, STR, ACC, etc.). When you move a player from WR to CB you will no longer see his speed drop.

That's quite a bit of information for Dynasty Mode (and Online Dynasty)... I feel like I'm back in school writing a 1000* word essay.

Thanks for taking the time to read over our updates.  I look forward to getting the game in your hands as July 14th fast approaching.

-Russ Kiniry
Designer - NCAA Football 10

*  - Technically it ended up being 975 (yes I counted this as well)