EA Sports College Football: The Art Of Scheduling

EA Sports College Football: The Art Of Scheduling

I’ve had so much fun with the EA Sports College Football game and can’t wait for the next one to drop. After winning back-to-back national championships with East Carolina (find the hub here) I feel like I’ve mastered this game in all aspects. I’ve already done a post on recruiting. Now I’m going to give a quick rundown on the art to scheduling opponents.

*This post is intended for real dynasty players. Not the noobs who take over Alabama and have everything handed to them. This is about strategically building up those one-star programs into powerhouses like I did with ECU.*

A: Let’s start simple. Your schedule needs to tie into two things:

1: Recruiting

2: Making the Playoff

In the recruiting post, I talked about creating save files. There is nothing wrong with doing your homework and knowing the road ahead. When you do anything with your schedule, you should keep recruiting and making the playoff in the forefront of your mind.

Does your schedule aid your recruiting class?

Does your schedule give you a better chance to make the playoff?

If you’re not asking those two questions before making your schedule… WTF are you doing?

Let’s dive into each further.

For recruiting, this really depends on where you are in your rebuild. If you’re in season number one, schedule hard opponents you think you can beat based on the way you play. It’s why I scheduled Iowa and won landing multiple recruits because of that win. I’m very good at running the ball and stopping the run. Iowa felt like a great matchup for me and we took care of business. Getting a win like that as a one star program is a huge boost when you bring players in on visits. It’s probably your only chance to land those five and four star players as a loser program.

Once you’ve built up the program, you’re going to battle those top tier teams for certain players. If there is a certain player on the recruiting board you want and are fighting with another team for them… why not schedule them and play it out on the field? I did this with Tennessee for a wide receiver I wanted. Sweated out the game and landed the player I wanted because of it.

For making the playoff, don’t get carried away. Don’t make your schedule so insane you miss the playoff because of it. If college football has taught us anything, they value record over anything. If you don’t think you can beat a certain team, do not schedule them. It’s far better to beat up on bad teams than it is to lose to an elite team. It’s just the way that it is. You can sneak into the playoff as a terrible team by beating up on bad teams. It happens every year in real life too.

B: Value Rivalry Games.

If you win home rivalry games, you get an enormous boost for visits. It’s a big reason why I moved ECU to the ACC cause I could pick up rivalry game wins over UNC and NC State. Once you build up your team, move them to a better conference. It helps that section of recruiting and make sure you have rivalry games built into the conference. It’s a killer in recruiting if you don’t have them. Once you have those intact, schedule around them. If you can add more to your schedule… do it.

C: Schedule Mostly Home games

It’s way harder playing the game on the road. The game cheeses hard on the road. If the crowd is roaring, sometimes the buttons will disappear and you don’t even know who you’re throwing it to. There is zero incentive to schedule road games. Schedule them at home and pick up the visits for recruits at the same time. It’s way easier winning at home too and the game doesn’t seem to factor homefield at all after the fact in the rankings.

If you want to schedule a road game, do it with a cupcake for a stadium you want to see. I scheduled Hawaii and UNLV in the past on the road. A great way to kick off Week 0.

D: Be Smart About The Cupcakes You Pick

If you play your cards right, you just might get lucky and schedule a fraud team that stinks but lucked their way into a bunch of wins. It’s going to happen. One team from a trash conference will run off some wins but you know is trash. Try to find that team and take them down. Arkansas State was somehow ranked at the end of the year when I beat them. A ranked win is a ranked win. We’ll take them any way you can get them. Especially when you can laugh your way to them.

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