How to pick the best pipelines for you in College Football 25

Licensed college football video gaming is back, baby, and we are having the time of our lives (wonky option controls and all) with EA Sports College Football 25. A follow-up to NCAA Football 14, the game introduced plenty of features, including the riveting pipelines system.

The pipelines system, available in Dynasty Mode, helps the game better replicate real college football recruiting. You might be wondering what pipelines are and how to pick the best pipelines in EA Sports College Football 25. You’ve come to the right place.

What are pipelines?

Pipelines are states or regions that a school or coach has extra familiarity with. Mechanically, this means recruits from your school or coaches’ pipeline regions are more likely to be interested in your school.

This is meant to mimic IRL recruiting, where high school athletes are often (but not always!) more likely to be interested in schools in or near their home state than moving far away from home. Even this is included in the game — for some recruits, proximity to home is a high priority (or even a dealbreaker); for others, it barely matters. But the pipeline will help get you in the door.

Some states are split into multiple pipelines, and some states are combined into a single pipeline. For example, the extremely talent-loaded states of California, Georgia, Florida and Texas are all split into multiple pipelines (e.g. “Central Florida,” “South Georgia,”), while less talent-dense states are combined into multiple state regions like “Big Sky” and “Pacific Northwest.”

Image: EA Tiburon/Electronic Arts via Polygon

Schools operate on a tiered ranking system for their pipelines, from one (weakest) to five (strongest). Each school has a pipeline level based on how well they have historically recruited that region. These pipeline levels for schools are locked in and will not change over the course of your save file, but you can change your coach’s pipeline through the “Edit Coach” menu.

What’s the best pipeline for my team?

When you create a coach in Dynasty Mode, you will choose a pipeline for the coach. Narratively, this represents your coach’s professional background — where did they cut their teeth before getting this position? Where do they have the most connections with high school coaches? Mechanically, this is a way to choose which region you want a leg up in recruiting.

For example, I have a Dynasty Mode file with Maryland, where I went to school. For my coach there, I chose the Tidewater pipeline, because it covers the region Maryland is in and generally likes to recruit from (there’s no official explanation of what “Tidewater” covers, but because Maryland, DC, Virginia, and Delaware aren’t pipeline options, I think it’s safe to assume that’s what Tidewater means here). My goal in this save is to eventually dominate the Tidewater region with Maryland and get the best recruits there year after year.

Image: EA Tiburon/Electronic Arts via Polygon

But for a dynasty with New Mexico, a school I don’t plan on staying at forever, choosing a pipeline in Texas or California might make more sense than the New Mexico pipeline. Both of those states are close enough to New Mexico that I’d still be fine on the Proximity to Home rating, and hopefully it’d allow me to snap up a few overlooked recruits from those jam-packed regions.

Schools also prefer coaches who have pipelines that synergize with theirs, so if you’re starting a dynasty at a one-star school but eventually want to land a job at Alabama, it might be wise to pick Alabama as your pipeline.

What are the best pipelines generally?

Again, it’s best to think of this within the context of your school and your goals for the save file. This is a subjective choice, not an objective one, and it’s generally better to choose an area that makes sense for your school and your save file rather than just picking the most jam-packed region.

But maybe you’re coaching at a school that can get just about any recruit it wants, like Alabama or Georgia. With a gluttony of choices, which should you prioritize?

The various Florida, Texas, Georgia, and California pipelines are strong starting points – each will have a bevy of talent available in each class. Beyond those, Louisiana and Metro Atlanta are other talent-rich options worth considering.

Image: EA Tiburon/Electronic Arts via Polygon

Each pipeline region not only has a level of quality talent associated with it, but a type of quality talent tied to the region. We don’t know each of these, but here are a few examples from EA’s deep dive on Dynasty Mode:

For example, Southern California is known for producing great quarterback talent, while East Texas consistently produces some of the best wide receivers in the country. However, we didn’t stop there. We wanted to go deeper to ensure we were capturing the authenticity of high school talent. Yes, East Texas is known for producing great receivers, but more specifically, they are known for how big and physical their receivers are. As a result, you are going to see bigger and more physical receivers coming out of East Texas, whereas South Florida is going to produce incredibly fast deep threat receivers who have a smaller size.

So in short, the answer is “it depends on what you want.” Are you looking for QBs above all else? Southern California is the way to go. Are you looking to dominate your school’s region? Pick that.

One of the joys of college football dynasties is they are what you make of them, and you can set your own goals — and the pipeline system just adds one other way to enrich that experience.

For more College Football 25 guides, see our beginner’s guide or learn how to throw a perfect touch pass.