Speaking of dynasty mode, a couple of new wrinkles have been added in NCAA 06, the most significant of which is the inclusion of in-season recruiting. Week by week, you can allocate a percentage of your recruiting clout to pursuing top high school players. Over the course of the season, recruits will cull their lists of prospective schools down, and if you can make it to their final three, you can invite them on campus for a visit and a hard sell. You'll want to pick a weekend where you play (and hopefully beat) a marquee opponent. If you're shrewd, you'll be able to pick up a few blue chippers before the real bulk of the recruiting happens in the offseason. The inclusion of in-season recruiting is a nice touch, giving you more to do during the season. But it's not perfect. For example, if you drop off of a recruit's list of prospective schools, you can't (for some unknown reason) pursue a new player that you didn't target at the start of the season. You must simply reallocate your points to one of your other preseason targets.
The developer has also added the notion of recruiting pipelines into NCAA 06. If you have a good number of players from a certain state, that state becomes a pipeline for you, and it supposedly becomes easier--later on--to recruit players from that state. For most schools, only their home state and maybe a couple of neighboring ones are designated as pipelines. However, as you advance through the years of a dynasty and improve your school's standing, you'll create more pipelines in different states. It sounds nice in theory, but in our testing, we had a hard time discerning the tangible effects of creating a pipeline. Still, there have been other nice tweaks made, such as a running notebook that keeps track of which pitches you've already used on a recruit and how effective it was, as well as a scouting system that updates all of a recruit's vital stats (instead of just one at a time).
