NCAA Football 14

The phone call has been the centerpiece of NCAA's recruiting system since 2008, but series producer Ben Haumiller says it was never really meant to be that way. The mechanic was originally supposed to be a first step in a larger process, but somewhere along the way developer EA Tiburon became unwittingly more and more beholden to it. Recalling a realization the team had, Haumiller says, "We're not getting new features in dynasty because we're trying to recreate this phone call thing. Let's just cut this cord right now."

The excising of the recruiting phone call is just the start of changes for the process in NCAA 14. In its place is a more streamlined system that also puts more power in the hands of coaches and their staff.

Teams have a bank of points they can spend on recruiting players every week, with a per-player point limit for that week. You can tweak how many points you allocate to each player from week to week, or you can set it once and then let it run automatically. The new system also gives you a last-ditch attempt to sway potential players in the offseason, where you get a large pool of points and no restriction on how many of them you can allocate to a player.

Schools' grades in areas like TV exposure, academics, and conference prestige are just as important, and these are applied automatically as bonus points every week. Dynamic pitches also remain. If your grade as a championship contender fluctuates during the season, the bonus points applied from that pitch will also change. Dynamic pitches also come into play with player dealbreakers. These prevent you from recruiting a player because your team doesn't have a good enough grade in a particular category important to him. Change that grade and you can now try and recruit the player. On the other hand, should you fall below his dealbreaker mid-season, you can still recruit him; you just won't get any bonus points from that dynamic pitch.

Although you're more removed from recruiting players since you don't call them anymore, NCAA 14 gives you more influence over the process than ever before thanks to coach skills. Coaches and their staff get XP points for in-game accomplishments and recruiting success, and head coaches can spent these on a skill tree with two different branches: recruiting and game management. The former gives you more recruiting points depending on which week in the season you're in, or it could help make a player instantly commit to your school or break up a player's dealbreaker on your school. Game management skills include removing an opponent's home field advantage (no more squiggly lines pre-snap), the ability to kill the ice the kicker effect, and more.

Coordinators also have their own skills that give players' per-game ratings boosts depending on that coordinator's expertise, such as granting defensive backs better coverage skills. You can respec any skills you've bought as a coach or a coordinator at the end of the season.

NCAA 14 not only gives you more influence as a coach, but your objectives are also judged more fairly by the powers that be. Your contract is now judged on a more macro level. The game tracks a program over a larger swath of time, averaging out the number of wins in the past four years to calculate your minimum expectation. Thus, small schools need fewer wins to maintain or raise that school's prestige, while big-time programs need more to sustain it and move forward.

Given how much time you spend recruiting during a season, NCAA 14's changes to the system as a whole, on paper, sound like the best of both worlds – removing some of the tedium while also expanding your power and influence as a coach. With these kinds of tools at your disposal, building your dynasty should be easier than ever.

NCAA Football 14 comes out for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on July 9. For more on the game's inclusion of the Ultimate Team mode, check out this preview. You can also check out its new gameplay features with the Infinity Engine.

The Closer skill gives you a recruiting edge at the end of the season.