How Pipelines Impact Recruiting in College Football 25

Pipelines are one of the many mystery boxes in EA Sports College Football 25 and the recruiting part of dynasty mode. This guide is here to clear up some of that confusion and explain the power of pipelines for recruiting.

Why Do Pipelines Matter For Recruiting?

There are 42 pipelines in the game, and they do vary in strength. This guide won’t get too deep into those rankings as I already did an article on them, but you do need to realize certain pipelines are better than others because better players (and generally more players) come out of some of these pipelines.

In addition, certain player types come out of these pipelines more often, and this is somewhat based on real life, as explained by EA.

On top of that, you need to understand that a pipeline has a rank between 1 and 5. One is the lowest score you can have for a pipeline, and five is the highest score you can have for a pipeline. These are color coded in the game.

• Pink is 5 (the best)
• Blue is 4
• Gold is 3
• Silver is 2
• Bronze is 1 (the worst, but still better than not having one at all)

So in the image above, you can see Penn State, UNC, Clemson, and Alabama all have pink for this prospect (Kyler Maze) from Maryland, which would fall under the Tidewater pipeline. This means any recruiting actions those four schools apply to Maze will have more impact than Ohio State (Blue – Tier 4), or NC State and Northwestern (Silver – Tier 2).

Plenty of smart people have gone in-depth on these colors and how strong each level really is in a vacuum, and I’m just here to distill all that info down into this nugget of information: tier 4 and 5 pipelines (blue and pink) are way better than tiers 1-3.

You can maybe overcome a Tier 5 pipeline as a Tier 4 pipeline if you put in the recruiting hours on a player, but you’ll need to pray if you want to beat out a Tier 5 as a Tier 3 or below — assuming that school with a Tier 5 pipeline does not totally ignore the player.

Even if you don’t care about how strong each pipeline is in the game — but here’s a guide if you do care — the pipelines are one of the major factors you should always consider when recruiting. It is maybe the factor to consider when recruiting. As a lower prestige school, I would get very used to selecting the My Pipelines tab in the Prospect List at the start of each season and really trying to target the players in that tab first because they are the ones you’ll be best setup to grab (especially if you have a Tier 4 or 5 pipeline).

You should also get used to praying if you’re a lower prestige school with garbage pipelines when you see an Alabama or Clemson all the sudden showing interest in some three-star player from the Tidewater pipeline (a Tier 5 pipeline for them) you’ve been recruiting since Week 1. They will close the gap, and they will close the gap in a hurry. You are the underdog even if the recruiting status bar says otherwise.

Lastly, there is no way to “organically” increase your pipeline for a school. So let’s say you recruit 20 players from East Texas while using Nebraska. You’re not going to improve your East Texas pipeline — or even have one — just because you got some players to come to Nebraska.

You improve pipelines via your coach.

Coach Pipelines And Coach Abilities

Teams do prefer when their coach pipeline aligns with their team’s pipeline, but that matters more for getting hired during the offseason (or when hiring coordinators). This also makes sense if you think of the pitches at your disposal (or the dealbreakers) for recruiting. There is a pitch for Proximity to Home, but you can’t sell that to a recruit from New York when you’re coaching in Wyoming even if your coaching pipeline is New York.

Your coach pipeline does not actually impact your recruiting too much, at least at first. It’s not until you get some of the harder to get abilities that pipelines really get boosted. It’s also worth remembering that EA explained that abilities do stack:

The “stacking” is why we can maybe guess that having the same coaching pipeline as your team’s normal pipeline is good even in Year 1 with no abilities (but it’s mostly negligible).

Either way, we do know that abilities in the Program Builder tree do make those coach pipelines matter, and thus they also can make your school’s pipelines matter.

After winning five playoff games, you can unlock the Program Builder tree. In this tree, we have the Strong Roots ability:

You can see the Tier 1 boost called Giving Back will boost your primary pipeline. Your primary pipeline is for your head coach, and that’s the pipeline you picked when you made him. The Tier 2 and Tier 3 boosts also give you goodies for your primary pipeline. This is how you actually make your coaching pipeline more effective.

This is also why it’s helpful to select the same pipeline as at least one of your school’s pipelines. You will be boosting the team’s pipeline in a way that’s helpful through your coaching abilities (see: stacking).

Then we have the Relationship Builder ability:

You can see these abilities will boost your pipelines in various ways. The Tier 1 ability (Invest) upgrades your school’s best two pipelines by one tier. So, for example, if you have a Tier 4 pipeline for two spots, those blue rankings (4) move will move up to pink rankings (5) for your school’s best two pipelines. The same goes for the Tier 2 ability (Making Inroads) — and, yes, the Tier 1 and Tier 2 abilities do stack, so you can turn a Tier 3 into a Tier 5 once you own both abilities.

The Tier 3 ability (Share The Wealth) will upgrade your school’s five worst pipelines by one tier. This means if you have five bronze pipelines, they will all become silver pipelines. The one exception is Sam Houston. Sam Houston only has four pipelines, so I’m not actually sure what happens to that school, but I assume you just don’t have a fifth pipeline to ever level up.

The Share The Wealth ability is also where you might want to consider how much you want to have a separate coach pipeline from your school’s pipeline because here’s a little nugget from Reddit user al_ways-becrootin (the person who put together the aforementioned pipeline rankings).

So what that means is instead of boosting five pipelines from bronze to silver for your team, you would upgrade four pipelines from bronze to silver, and then you would get a new bronze pipeline for that school that coincides with your coach pipeline (primary pipeline).

Between the pipeline rankings and this guide, you should now be equipped with all you need to know in order to understand and maximize the strength of pipelines in EA Sports College Football 25.