Roll Tide?
Just a quick note that I can confirm Joel’s statement about teams with losing records making Bowl games. Alabama just made the Car Tire Bowl (or whatever that thing is called) with a 4-8 record. This is the first time I have seen this happen and in Todd’s five year 360 test it never came up but it happened tonight on the Xbox. A lot of 6-6 teams didn’t make the Bowl while Bama got to play Cincinnati…and lose 34-10. I also noticed at the end of the year a QB from Iowa (not Tate, this was in like 2009) tossed 47 TDs and 17 Ints. Yow! That is one wild season.
I think Todd’s test showed a few things:
-The polls stayed pretty much the same as far as power teams staying in power with the occassional mid major poking its head out of the sand.
-On the whole there are too many undefeated teams and way too many 10-2 teams. I dunno how or why the game would do that (we’d need to look at the schedules) but to see that many 12-0, 11-1, and 10-2 teams is just odd. This one is a head scratcher.
-Recruiting in the game is decent enough but also a bit odd. Michigan wins the title and doesn’t pull in a top 20 recruitng class back to back years following a 13-0 season? Ouch. Go Lloyd go!
-There are not enough 5-Star Blue Chip recruits. 4-Star recruits go to mid level teams far too often. When you look at Scout or Rivals.com you’ll notice that a lot of teams like your Fresnos, Nevadas, and Colorado States rarely pull in a 4-star recuit and when they do it’s a real coup. Usually teams like this only pull in 3 or 4 3-star recruits out of a 20 player class. The rest are 1 and 2 star kids, some of whom blossom into very good players but they simply were not that highly regarded coming out of HS for whatever reason. But to see a year where Florida State and Tennessee pull in ZERO 5 star kids and USC pulls in only one…no way.
Of course this isn’t reality, it’s EA’s gameworld so we simply have to adapt to it. Personally, as long as the power teams stay strong (with the usual flucuations) I’m cool with all of this. I am curious as to why EA limited the number of 5-star prospects, though. There needs to be more than 30. It should be closer to 60.
I think the Dynasty mode, now that the gameplay is back on course from the past two years, I think the recruiting model could use a new fresh coat of paint and some needed fine-tuning. And yeah…fix that 4-8 Bowl team bug.