NCAA Football 10 Basics

Think you know better than your real-life coach? Or maybe you want to build up a no-name college to a top-25 contender? Dynasty Mode is for you!

Dynasty is not quite as rich as other college games, football or otherwise. While you're technically playing a coach, you are not in danger of being instantly fired, nor are you trying to build any personal legacy other than, possibly, Xbox Achievements. While I am admittedly getting ahead of myself, you can change jobs after your season, but doing so seems arbitrary as far as what schools are actually offering you positions.

Anyway, back to Dynasty Mode proper. When you start, you can pick any college you wish to start your career. Your first step is setting recruits for the upcoming season; you won't actually recruit anyone until after your first season, but this way you can set your targets and priorities. The game does a good job explaining what to do and gives you plenty of options to simulate through decisions, so you can bypass a lot of the details if you just want to get to playing. On the other hand, if you're the type of coach who wants to micromanage absolutely everything, trust me: the options are there.

Via Xbox Live or the PSN, you can purchase "Dynasty Mode Accelerators" to gain an edge. For Dynasty Mode, you can purchase quite a few different ones that revolve around recruiting, including getting access to the Recruiting Advisor, who will give you reports each in-game week about which high school prospects are eager to join you, and which ones are better than their ratings may indicate. If you do not wish to drop the real-life money on those features, know that it's still quite easy—with adequate recruiting aggression—to find those sleeper prospects yourself.

After you set your recruits, you can start redshirting players. This means to basically forbid that player to play for a year, which doesn't help you in the short-term for winning games but allows him to grow while maintaining a year of eligibility. You can only redshirt any given player once for his whole career, so you'll want to time it well. Generally, you'll want to redshirt a young player who is very skilled in a position where you're pretty strong.

You definitely never want to redshirt players who are in a weak position. My FBs are atrocious, and I've only got 2 of them. Redshirting either would leave me even more weak in that position, and next year I'll probably get rid of them anyway, so it's not worth it.

Once you set your redshirts for the season, you can reorder the depth charts. You'll generally want to make your strings in reverse order of overall ability at that position. That is, your starter should be your best player at that position, your second string should be the second-best player, and so on. You only want to break from this if you want to develop a player for a year. For example, if you've got a freshman HB at 80 and a sophomore at 79, you may want to start the sophomore: it gives the freshman an extra year to develop safely. Just remember you've only got four years to develop anyone though, so I'd recommend only messing with the order of the depth chart if someone is a freshman.

The final pre-season act is to set your schedule. Most of the games in the middle of the season are locked in due to being within conference, but your other games are free to change. You can have up to 12 games, though you can have fewer. Remember that fewer or easier games will lower your strength of schedule, which can affect the BCS's decision on what games, if any, to invite you to in the post-season.

After that, you're ready for the season proper. You can play or sim through all your games, and you can sim or personally do recruiting for all your targets. Remember that as the season advances, your prospects may change their school interests and their skills, so you'll need to adjust to that.

After the season is over, you can change schools if you desire. You'll get reports on what players are leaving for the pros, due to graduation, or for other schools. You can try talking to players thinking about the pro draft and try to convince them to stay, but there's nothing you can do about graduating players. For the players you can convince, don't waste your breath on players who don't matter. For example, if that junior really wants to go and you have good players behind him on the depth chart, just let him go; it's not worth taking away from your recruiting time to convince him to stay.

Once your players are gone, you set your recruits for the season, then need to trim your roster down to 70 players. Again, be sure to cut only those players who are lousy and in positions where you're already strong. Even my crappy FBs, both of whom are under 50-rated, need to stay on the team: they're the only two I've got!

After the cuts, you're back to the beginning: redshirting players and setting your recruits for the next season. Can you make a true college dynasty?