All Posts by raczilla

Now that we've got our full roster of players, it's time to head into the preseason. I had a number of decisions to make in the pre-season, but the most important area to cover off was recruiting. As every fan of the NCAA Football series knows, this is the first chance to see the recruits that are out there and add prospects to your team's recruiting board. Let's take a look at some of what I've found out about our recruits.

My School

To compete with other top schools in the nation, you want to see your school highly ranked in all of the areas recruits tend to care about. I left the Orlando Raczillas with the default set up of the powerhouse template, and that means they are really good at almost everything. It might seem like it will make recruiting easy, but here's the thing... I decided to put this team into the SEC replacing Kentucky, so they're competing with some pretty tough schools in both their conference and their state. Hopefully the top prospects know to choose the Raczilla's over the Gators.

Team Needs

I always like to recruit the best players available, but it's also important to recruit for need. Here's a look at our team on both sides of the ball. Fortunately there aren't a lot of areas with really pressing need so we'll be able to go after the best talent instead of trying to fix weak areas.

Top Recruits

Here's a look at the top 14 prospects in the nation.

Recruits interested in the Orlando Raczillas

And here are the players in the top 100 who are already wisely considering joining our squad.

Matt Wright

One of our best prospects so far is Matt Wright, the top ranked cornerback in this year's class. He's got a lot of potential and is a hard hitter, which I love, but we're competing with two other top Florida schools to get him. More on Matt Wright next week as we dive into recruiting and our week 1 game against Notre Dame!

What's next?

I'm going to try and get to the next post ASAP (I'm traveling this week but I'll give it a shot!). Let me know what questions you have and what your thoughts are about recruiting. Do you think I should be going after certain players? Are there specific kinds of players I should search for? Are there players in that top 10 for whom you'd like to see more stats? Let me know.

You'll also want to follow me on Twitter (twitter.com/raczilla) as I've been talking back in forth with fans to help make decisions about the schedule, playbooks, etc. I might even have time to do some live recruiting via Twitter when I'm back in the office next week, so look out for that and send me some questions and comments in the mean time!

To read the original blog post and make comments, visit the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.

-raczilla

Think you've got a great uniform that everyone would like to see? Maybe you've got an even better one using the EA SPORTS logo? Share your thoughts in the comments and maybe we'll see your creation here on the blog next week.

I hope you've been enjoying our NCAA Football 10 content the last couple of months here on the Inside EA SPORTS blog. By now a lot of you have heard about TeamBuilder, and hopefully some of you have had a chance to get on the website and create a team or two. Today I created my very own team called the Orlando Raczillas. A bit of a ridiculous team name I know, but I wanted to throw something together quickly that I could talk about here on the blog so all of you can follow along and participate.

What does the uniform look like?

I went with a simple blue and white color scheme, and set myself up with a basic 'raczilla' logo for the helmet. You won't be able to find my team on the Team Builder website because I put it up on one of our test servers, but I did take a couple of shots of the page so you can see what the uniform looks like. Below are a couple of the combinations I created.

Try out for the team!

One of the coolest things about TeamBuilder is the ability to completely edit your roster. Right now my whole team is full of auto-generated names, but I thought it might be fun to let some of you join the team. If you fill out the following information in the comments, I'll pick some of the best entries to fill out my roster. Not everyone can be picked and not everyone will necessarily get the position they want, but filling out the following as completely as possible will give you the best chance!

First Name: You may use your real first name here.

Last Name: No real last names please. Choose whatever name you go by in the community, or I can use your login name from the comments.

Handedness: Right or left handed?

Height:

Weight:

Desired position: Put whatever position you'd most like to play, but keep in mind that you may not get the spot you want.

Special requests: You can request a certain number, skin tone, etc. here. A lot of you may pick the same number so remember that you may not get your requested number if you make the team. (No ratings requests please. I'm going to try and make sure we've got a balanced team).

Why should you be picked? This part is really important. In a couple of sentences, make your case for joining the roster. I'll be using these answers to help select who gets in, so make them count!

If you're picked, you'll join the rest of your teammates and be featured in an ongoing dynasty report on the Inside Blog. Check out a screen below of our stadium.

What's next?

After I've given everyone a few days to post try out information, I'll come back and announce who made the squad and what position each of you will play. We'll then jump right into year one where everyone here on the blog can read along and help make decisions such as who starts, what playbook to use, which players I recruit, and how much time to spend on them, and more. I'm going to try and update this report as much as possible leading up to the July 14th launch of the game, so follow along and enjoy.

Good luck to those of you trying out!

To read this original blog post and make comments, visit the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.

-raczilla