Don't worry, I had to make the choice before everyone responded since the OD needed to be advanced. Sadly I ate a bunch of D+s! The secret was safe for the moment!
But with the list as it is:
Rivalry Game > Ranked Opponent > Conference Game > Regular Game > Bye Week
kind of negates the as soon as possible thought process. I get not picking the bye, lesson learned! However if I can do a conference game next week or the rivalry 2 weeks after that (conf, another game and then rivalry), which would you pick?
For me, it'd depend on when the other schools recruiting the guy are scheduling visits. If there's a guy me and another team or two are going after, we're all in the green and are all within a couple hundred points of each other, if I have a conference game in week 9 and a rivalry game in week 12, but Team A has a visit scheduled with the recruit in week 10 and Team B has a visit scheduled in week 11, I'm going with the regular conference game in week 9 in an attempt to not only pick up a large, substantial gain from the visit, but also try and maybe get lucky with a commitment after that week.
I'd rather try and build up my points advantage and maybe get lucky and get a commit in week 9, than wait until week 12 and risk either having the other teams pass me, or even having everything go to hell and the guy soft or hard commit to one of the other teams.
Along the same lines as what Smooth said, what I do for my selection is first I decide when I need to have a visit done by. If I'm competing with a lot of teams and I think the player is going to sign quickly, it's going to be early. If I can afford to slow play, it's going to be late. But within that window, I'm going to pick the best game available.
In other words, especially after NCAA 11 took away the ability to change Visit dates, I would never bring a prospect in for a rivalry game unless I was very confident that he won't make his decision before then. If it's a hot prospect that has a lot of competition, I'll often pick the earliest conference game.
There's more to the list than G posted (so there are still some secrets ), but the big thing to keep in mind is that while his list is accurate, the difference between a Rivalry game and even a Conference game is minimal. The big differences aren't until you get into Out of Conference and Bye Week visits.
Twitter: @3YardsandACloud
One thing that sort of jumps out to me as far as G's list, would be for Out of Conference games, to me it seems like it's something that would be obvious, as an example, a 6-2 opponent would be better than a 2-6 opponent when having a recruit visit. Basically, when you have Out of Conference games, records, at least to some extent, would matter, with you wanting to invite recruits to games against Out of Conference opponents with a better record than to games against opponents with a losing record.
It would be logical, but AFAIK, if they're not ranked, it doesn't make a difference.
Twitter: @3YardsandACloud
Ah, alright. Yeah, that was one thing that immediately came to mind, was that it seemed like it would be better to have recruits visit against a 6-2 or other similarly good record OOC opponent than against a 2-6 or whatever poor record OOC opponent. If the NCAA team haven't really made the system to go that in-depth when it comes having recruits visit on certain games, alright, but maybe something they could think about in the future, as it would further make certain games better to have recruits visit than others.
True, but let's think about it for a second. As I said above, the differentiation between Rivalry and Conference games is pretty low. While a "normal" game is below those, it's still not that far below. So would differentiating between a "good" non-conference opponent and a "bad" one really make a huge difference? Probably not. Maybe not even a letter grade. For the sake of realism, sure, it would be nice. But perhaps unnecessary.
Twitter: @3YardsandACloud
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