College Football 26 is here.

This is the second iteration of the beloved college football franchise, as EA Sports brought it back with College Football 25. While fans had their decade-long prayers answered in 2024, this year's game was expected to propel the franchise forward and take it into a new era.

The fan-favorite dynasty mode is back, with gamers having the chance to take over their favorite schools (or some of the worst programs in the country) and try to mold them into perennial national championship contenders.

Unlike Madden, which relies on the draft, free agency, and trading, College Football 26 puts more of an emphasis on recruiting and the transfer portal. EA Sports kept many of the same mechanics from last year's game, but it overhauled the minutia of the recruiting process. Overall, recruiting feels more difficult, especially if you are playing as a smaller school. This means that you have to take advantage where you can, including picking the most advantageous pipeline for your coach. 

📲 Follow The Sporting News on WhatsApp

Here are the best pipelines in College Football 26, and more on how to recruit in this year's game. 

Best pipelines in College Football 26

The best pipelines in the game aren't going to surprise you. You want pipelines in places that produce the highest number of players so that you have more players to choose from. This gives you the best chance of finding those hidden gems, and then the task becomes making sure they stay at your school throughout their career. 

If you want to give yourself the best chance at recruiting, take one of these pipelines. 

• California (Northern and Southern)
• Texas (North, East and Southwest)
• Florida (North, Central and South)
• Georgia (Metro Atlanta and South)

These states are obvious choices because they are known as football powerhouses in real life. In College Football 26, though, they are so prosperous with talent that the pipelines are broken down into regions within the state. For California, you are likely going to want to target southern California as opposed to northern. For Texas, southwest and north Texas would be better options than east Texas because they cover more space within the state, giving you more cities that your prospects can be from in the region. 

Florida's preferred pipelines would be those in central or south Florida, rather than those in north Florida. The biggest surprise on this list could be the inclusion of Georgia. Whether it is due to the prominence of SEC programs or another reason, CFB 25 and 26 appear to follow a similar pattern, with a surprising number of recruits from the state of Georgia. You can't go wrong with either region, as they split the state in half. 

To find out which schools have the best pipelines, you can use this website. These are the levels with the current head coaches in the game. If you were to create a custom coach, you'd want to choose the best pipeline possible for your area to strengthen it. 

What is a pipeline in College Football 26?

College Football is largely still a regional sport. Yes, conference realignments have now created ridiculous yearly cross-country matchups, but in order to be a successful program, you have to be able to recruit in your own backyard.

A pipeline in CFB 26 gives you an added boost on players from certain locations. Generally, you get a higher boost the closer the players are to your school, but that also depends on your coach. Pipelines are ranked in a tier system from 1-5, with a Tier 5 pipeline (represented by a pink icon) giving the biggest added boost. 

For example, if you were to fire up a dynasty and pick the University of South Carolina and kept Shane Beamer as the head coach, you would find that the Gamecocks have a Tier 5 pipeline in South Carolina, a Tier 3 pipeline in Metro Atlanta and North Carolina, and then Tier 1 pipelines in south Georgia, Tidewater (the game's term for Virginia and Maryland), Tennessee, Alabama, north Texas, central Florida, and south Florida. 

How do pipelines work in Dynasty mode?

If you don't play the Dynasty mode in CFB 26, you will not have to worry about pipelines. If you are an avid College Ultimate Team (CUT) player, pipelines do not play into the team chemistry aspect of the modes. 

For Dynasty, however, pipelines are the backbone of recruiting. Each tier of a pipeline gives you a weekly boost when recruiting a player. Theoretically, if you and another school were going after the same player and you had a Tier 2 pipeline boost and they had a Tier 1 pipeline boost — and you used the same amount of recruiting hours — you should get the player to commit to your school in this specific example. 

This doesn't mean that you can't recruit players from an area where you don't have a pipeline boost. On the contrary, you will likely have to. It simply means that when you pursue those players, you will likely have to allocate more of your allotted recruiting hours to them to stay competitive with schools that have a pipeline advantage. 

How to recruit in College Football 26

The recruiting board itself in CFB 26 will look similar if you played last year's game. You still have a maximum of 35 players that you can add to your board. Luckily, this year, when you tab over to the prospect list, there is a team needs panel above the list of players that will update as you add players to your board. 

Each week during the season, you will get a set number of hours that you can use to entice players to join your school. The things you can do, like offering a scholarship, searching the player's social media, DM the player, etc., all still have the same hourly allotment cost. The biggest change this year on the recruiting side is that visits vary in cost depending on the distance between the player and your school. Last year, it was a standard 40 hours per player, but now it can range between 10 and 40 hours, bringing in more strategy to scheduling those. 

Like last year, each school will still be rated on a letter scale for things that players are interested in. Players will still have dealbreakers that could eliminate them from your school, but you will have the chance to soft-sell and hard-sell recruits on your program. Another new addition this year is that some players will now get down to a top two, resulting in a recruiting battle. 

College Football 26 recruiting tips 

Last year, it felt like you needed to start out as a recruiter if you created a new coach. This year, it feels like motivator could be the better archetype to go with. This year, players' dealbreakers can increase over the course of their careers, so initially their pro potential requirement may be a C, but as they progress, they could increase it to an A and potentially transfer if their requirements are not met. 

• Coordinators are more important this year. You can extend your own coordinators, rather than it being automatic, but some abilities are very useful in revealing a development trait before signing day.
• The recruiting board does a better job of showing icons when players change their interest in you. It becomes more important to check the board each week to ensure you understand how players are feeling. 
• There seems to be more variety in schools competing for players, at least on 3-star players or lower, so keep an eye on the competing pipelines.
• Visits feel like they don't give as much of a boost as they used to, at least early in the recruiting process. There is more strategy when deciding to bring in players for a visit and the timing of it.
• If you have a dealbreaker in a certain category, you can tab over to "My School," hover over each category, and the ones that you can improve game-to-game are searchable by player archetype based on what they are specifically looking for.