One of the most exciting features of NCAA Football 09 is clearly the addition of online dynasties. While we weren't able to complete a full season in our online dynasty, many of the elements mimic those of the offline dynasty. Today we will be breaking down a full season of an offline dynasty in NCAA Football 09 to give you an idea of what you can expect from both the online and offline when you pick up the game. I know many of you may be familiar with how dynasty mode worked in last year's game but I will try to touch on all elements of this game mode in case some of you have never experienced it.
For our dynasty we will be using my Washington Huskies. From the team select screen you will be given overall ratings for your offense and defense along with a 6-star barometer of the strength of your program as a whole. As you can see, the Huskies are not ranked but hopefully that will soon change.
Preseason
After selecting your school, you will be taken to the preseason menu where you will be able to adjust your depth chart, select which players to redshirt, and begin highlighting players for recruitment. As this will be your only opportunity to redshirt players, you will need to take some time to determine who you can do without for the season. While players selected to be redshirted won't have their attributes improve any more so than other players, this will save a year of the player's eligibility.
Once you are finished selecting which players to redshirt and making changes to your depth chart, you'll want to begin compiling a list of high school prospects for possible recruitment. One thing to keep in mind while targeting prospects is which positions will be thin once the season is over. As you can see, we have quite a few defensive positions to fill as a result of graduating seniors. While NCAA 09 does a good job of showing you the vacancies resulting from graduation, it will be up to you to anticipate who may leave via the NFL Draft or transfer to another school.
Once you know the positions you will be targetting, you will want to set is your team’s recruiting strategy. You can have the CPU handle most of the recruiting tasks for you if you like (which we did for this example).
Recruiting Board Assistance – Determines if the CPU will be allowed to add and remove prospects from your recruiting board.
Scholarship Offer Assistance – Determines if the CPU can offer scholarships to prospects.
Visit Assistance – Determines if the CPU can schedule on-campus and in-home visit dates.
While the CPU does a reasonable job at attracting the canidates already enamored with your program, it won't take the necessary risks to get the most coveted athletes. Besides, who plays dynasty only to let the CPU do all the work?
You will have many tools at your disposal to fill your recruiting board including a comprehensive list of every prospect in the country and an abbreviated list of just the top 100 prospects. Your most useful tool, however, will be the prospect search in which you will be able to set various criteria to find diamonds in the rough. You will be able to highlight up to 35 prospects to watch at one time but you will always be able to remove a player from the recruiting board in order to add additional players.
Once you have filled your recruiting board with your future talents you are ready to advance to the start of the college football season.
For those interested in doing so, you also have the option to modify your schedule at this time (though your conference games will be locked). You will be able to select any team to replace your existing non-conference games.
Starting The Season
Once you begin the season, you will be greeted with various "news stories" both local and nationwide. While the news stories are nothing more than headlines, the headlines will constantly change throughout the course of the season and give you a good idea of what's going on in the rest of college football. And, of course, it's rewarding when your team makes the national headlines (as long as they aren't trashing you for bad coaching anyway).
In case you are wondering how you are doing as a coach, you can always check your contract status. Here it will show you your approval rating, benchmarks for the season, and a bar indicating your integrity level. While your approval rating is entire based onyour teams performance on the field, your integrity is based on how well you keep promises made to new prospects committing to your school (more on this later). If all goes wrong as coach, you always have the option of quiting to join another program (assuming you haven't been canned already) but the list of schools will be slim if your previous stint didn't produce quality results.
Dynasty also offers your the ability to set custom stadium sounds based on various different in-game events. Each event can be mapped to a playlist where one track will be selected at random from the playlist when the event occurs. You can load multiple playlists onto your hard drive though in case you want one particular song/chant to play.
Mid-Season
Each week during the season, you will have 10 hours to spend calling various prospects on your recruiting board. While you have the option to budget a period of time and allow the CPU to handle the call, we will assume you will want to handle this yourself. During calls you will be able to talk to the player about various elements of your program to determine how important it is to the player. The categories are: academic prestige, campus lifestyle, coach experience, coach prestige, conference prestige, championship contender, athletic facilities, fan base, early playign time, pro factory, proximity to home, program stability, program tradition, and television exposure.
Next to each topic is how well you particular shcool rates in that catagory. For instance Washington has "excellent" academic prestige, offers "elite" early playing time (for his position), and is a "good" championship contender. The problem is that you wont know how important any of these factors are to your recruit until you talk to them about it. It will take a random amount of time talking before its importance is revealed. Sometimes it'll take an hour to find out "Fan Base" isn't important at all, while other times it may just take 5 minutes. You can elect to stop talking at anytime but, if you stop early, it wont reveal the importance.
Once you determine that something is important to the player (and hopefully your school is good at that topic), you can try to "sway" the player of its importance. Sometimes his importance value associated with that topic will increase by a small amount, other times it will stay the same and you'll have just wasted time.
You can pitch the athlete on the topic at any time (even if you havent gauged the importance). Pitching again takes a random amount of time but there is a face icon at the top of the screen indicating the player's mood. If you know something is important to him and your school is good at it, it will almost always make him a happy. Just be careful not to push it too far...
You will also be able to schedule on-campus visits in which you will again be able to pitch the prospects in up to 3 topics. For this reason it may be helpful to know at least 3 factors that the player deems important (at least for the most coveted players).
As players begin committing to various programs during the season, you will be able to see how your recruiting skills stack up with other schools. Here we see Michigan, despite not being ranked, is leading the pack. Washington, on the other hand, went 0-10 at this point as a result of sim'ing the season and it did not help our recruiting efforts.
Whether you choose to play the games yourself or are just sim'ing the games, you can always check out Lee and Kirk's evaluations of the teams and how the teams rank nationwide in various categories.
Again, Washington is not having a good season and the press has begun to take notice...
Post-Season
After the season is over (including any bowl games), you will advance to the off-season where you will be shown the players leaving your school. As mentioned earlier, transfers and the NFL Draft may steal players away where you thought your team was deep (although the Huskies were so lousy that not a single player declared their intention to enter the NFL draft). Be prepared.
While some of your recruits may have signed during the season, others may still be holding out for better offers. Luckily, you will now how the opportunity to sweeten the deal a bit. You can promise prospects up to 3 things in order to influence their decisions in the final weeks of signing. What you will be able to promise depends on how high your integrity level is. Low integrity (from past broken promises) may lock out may options.
Once done, you will have to wait and hope that a few players take the bait. While you wait, you will be able to evaluate the progress made by your current players (including those you chose to redshirt). The bonuses seem pretty arbritrary (our left tackle had the biggest increase) but they may be based on performance as well (no one had a good year for the Huskies so this is inconclusive).
Once all the signings are complete, you will need to trim your team by cutting underachieving players and reseting your depth chart. After that, you will enter the preseason of your second season. Rinse and repeat. Hopefully you have better luck than I did.
