How To Recruit Fullbacks

A few days ago, I felt the urge to learn, master, and commit to the triple option. I have never had a dynasty where my team was built around this type of offense.

The closest I ever came to that was my Kansas State dynasty where I ran Tom Osborne’s ole Nebraska offense.

I found his playbook and used his formations and concepts the best I could and had a complete blast doing so.

I never ran the triple option in that offense per se.

I actually used it like Osborne did which there was never a read that QBs like Tommy Frazier and Scott Frost had to make there; it was always a fake to the FB.

I just love using FBs. The simple FB dive can work wonders for your running game, and nothing beats seeing your FB plow over a LB for your HB to get to daylight!

I wanted to amplify my fullback even further, but I needed to recruit him in the right way.

Now that I have the desire to make the triple option the staple of my offense, I needed to do some research first.

If you know anything about the triple option, it is the fact that the fullback (or B-Back in some offenses) is the most important player in this offense.

Your FB is your workhorse who is supposed to carry the ball more than any other player.

The problem is that most fullbacks in NCAA 06 can’t run the ball very well. Half the time they will fumble it which is the last thing you want.

This means that I need players at that position who have good CARRY (CAR) ratings.

The other problem is how we go about recruiting the guys for our offense.

After doing some field study in dynasty mode, I have come up with answers to some questions that will benefit us all.

The Problem

I needed to find out which attributes are related to the CAR rating.

Both during the season and in the off-season, each prospect is given a set of attributes such as 40 time, bench, squat, hands, and field awareness.

Some of these are easily translatable:

• 40 Time = SPD
• Hands = CTH
• Field Awareness = AWR

By far the biggest mysteries of the bunch are the bench and the squat. I needed to see if either of these are related to the CAR rating.

In order to find this out, I simply simulated the first season of a dynasty in order to get to the recruiting side of things.

In order to get accurate numbers, I scouted the top 20 fullbacks in the country.

Half of these players already committed during the season and since I could not scout them and not get accurate numbers, I removed them from the study giving me 10 players to examine.

I jotted down all of their information and later went to the rosters to see their real ratings.

The table below is what I found.

The green rows are the attributes from recruiting and the purple rows are the players’ true ratings as freshmen.

I also listed each prospect’s position type which are Receiving, Blocking, or Balanced.

First look at the CAR ratings. Prospect A had the best CAR rating but it is mediocre 72.

I was hoping for either the bench or the squat to have something to do with this but I’m afraid it doesn’t.

Notice how Prospect B has much higher bench and squat numbers than Prospect A but his CAR rating is at a measly 62.

By looking at the rest of the prospects, you can see that neither the bench or the squat has nothing to do with a player’s CAR rating.

In fact, I believe there is no way to look at a fullback prospect’s numbers to see if he can carry the ball or not.

Prospect A was the number 1 FB prospect of the class and has great speed and has all the looks of an awesome future B-Back in any triple option offense, but if his CAR rating is only at 72, then why bother recruiting him in the first place?

Say you want to have fullbacks that only need to block for you. Should you recruit from the fullback pool for this type of player?

According to my table, it might be a bad idea too. Player E had the best RBK rating at 68 but apparently, that doesn’t translate from the bench or squat either.

His bench and squat are 395 and 470 but there are other prospects with higher or have the same numbers but have much lower RBK ratings.

You can draw more conclusions from this table, but the fact is there is no way to recruit a fullback to see if he would be a capable running fullback for your offense or not.

The Solution

Now that I have dampened your spirits of ever thinking about recruiting fullbacks and running the triple ever again, let me give my solution to the problem as it is something you have already done in the past.

In the past, whenever I want to run the ball from the fullback position and didn’t have what I needed, I would always use the Twin HB sub package.

This may seem like the simplest answer to all of this but it really isn’t.

The problem with this though is that it can be a pain in the butt to deal with injuries and substitutions when going this route.

Let’s say you have your speed back dotting the “I” and your power HB at the FB position using the sub package mentioned above. In order for this to work you have to put your power-back as your #2 HB on the depth chart.

What happens when HB #1 gets injured? The game automatically gets bumped to the #1 slot. Then you have to shuffle around constantly with this throughout the season.

You can’t even use this sub package in your traditional triple option formations such as Flexbone and Wishbone since there are always 3 running-backs on the field.

It’s just not worth the hassle when you can somehow have your best power-backs at FB and your speedsters at HB.

My solution to all of this is changing player positions from HB to FB.

After off-season recruiting ends, your next step is the ability to change player positions around to see if players might fit better somewhere else. Thank God for this feature!

I decided to do another experiment to see if I can move some heavier HBs over to FB permanently to see what would happen.

And boy was I surprised at what I found!

If I am going run the ball with a FB and wanted to move a HB over, I would normally (like any other common-sense coach would do) move over my heavier, stronger backs; guys who can break tackles and such.

I picked another team that had a few bigger, stronger HBs that I knew would be back the next year, long enough from me to move them over to FB.

Below is another table with the results I found.

The table shows two HBs I switch over. Each player has a set of ratings: their original ratings before the position change, their ratings after the position change, and their ratings after their training results.

Notice how for both players that several of their ratings plummet when switched over such as SPD and STR.

But look what happened after training. Their ratings go back to normal! Imagine having HB 1 as your fullback running the triple option.

He kept his strength and his CAR rating is high enough to where he will nut fumble the ball nowhere near as much as a traditional FB will.

Paul Johnson would give anything to have a player like that as his B-Back!

Be careful when trying to move true freshman over.

For whatever reason, 06 would rather you wait a year before doing this as sometimes this effect will not take place if a freshman is moved.

You can also try this with TEs too. Don’t expect these guys to carry the load for you but normally TEs have much better RBK ratings than normal FBs so don’t hesitate to try that out.

If I remember correctly, I had training points set to 32% at the beginning of the off-season (which is really high for me) so this may or may not have effected the high OVR bump for these players.

But since both player essentially went back to their original ratings, maybe that much training did not have much effect in the first place.

Conclusion

I am glad I was able to put my mind at ease about this since I did not want to recruit natural FBs year after year and them not producing for me.

Now with position changes I can finally get the FB I need to use in any type of offense.

Do some experimenting on your own by saving your dynasty right after off-season recruiting ends so you can play around with positions changes to see what you may find.

I know this works well on LBs being moved to DE so who knows what else is out there.

If you plan on running the ball a ton at the FB position, it is best to recruit big, strong HBs and move them over after their freshman year.

Experiment though to see if this effect work for true freshman.

If you want a traditional blocking back, either stick with big blocking FBs or move over similar built TEs and see what happens.

Hopefully this will answer some questions you have had related to this along with giving you some motivation to using the fullback more than you ever thought possible.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post them in the comment section.