Points bank — nothing expires at the season boundary, so hoarding for December is a real plan. Your ledger shows every point in and out and what it was for. A season earns about 4,500 — three paycheques, not one: 2,240 in weekly points spread across the sixteen, the Sponsor's 1,000 up front for the fall, and Concessions' 1,000 in December for the portal. Media and a bowl win are the rest.

Stars are a promise. Day-one skills come straight off this table, and it is published because you should never be guessing what you are buying:

Skills run 1–20. Tiers overlap at the edges — a hot three-star can edge a cold four — but a five-star's floor is a four-star's ceiling. Five-stars are a class of their own and priced like it.

These bands came down two points in September. Twelve machine-run seasons showed the league ratcheting itself up a rung a class until the whole roster had turned over, and it was this table doing it — not camps. Every gap between the grades survived the cut, so a blue chip is still worth the money; the league just plateaus at a Top 22 of 86 instead of 92. The five-star band is deliberately narrow: even the best recruit in the country arrives with nine points of development still ahead of him.

Specialty. A badge like Max +1 SPD guarantees that skill at the top of his grade, or above it. Hover any badge for what the skill does.

And the specialty runs the other way to everything else. Every three-star has one; half of four-stars do; and only a quarter of five-stars, who get plain Max and never more. A five-star is uniformly excellent and rarely spiky. A three-star is the one with something standing out — a Max +2 three-star is a five-star in that one dimension for 240 RP, and everyone can see it, which is exactly why his signing gets expensive.

Archetype. Only backs and receivers carry one, and only two questions are asked: POWR / SCAT is inside runs against outside runs, and BURN / POSS is deep routes against short. Everyone else is blank, and blank is not a deficiency — it means no situational lean either way.

Potential is a band, not a number. Every player has a POT from 1 to 5, and on the board you are shown only the range it falls in — 3-5 for a five-star, 1-4 for a three-star. The band always contains the truth; only its width varies. His exact number is announced at the start of his freshman season.

But the top of a band is not as likely as the rest of it. Every value in every band is genuinely on the table — nothing is advertised that cannot happen — yet a POT 5 comes up in only about one four-star in twelve and one five-star in eight. No three-star or below can reach it at all. That is deliberate: the league is meant to carry roughly one and a third of them per roster, so a 5 is a story rather than an entitlement. Signing a five-star buys you a known quantity, not a guaranteed All-American.

And potential is a fill rate, not a ceiling. 20 is the wall for everybody — a POT 1 reaches the same place a POT 5 does. He just costs roughly four times as many coaching points to get there. So the band is not telling you how good he might become; it is telling you how expensive he is going to be.

Which is why the widest band sits on the cheapest tier you would actually fight for. A three-star at POT 4 is the best value on the board and a three-star at POT 1 is a four-year money pit, and they look identical when you bid. Note also that a five-star arrives at 10–11 with nine or ten points of room left, while a three-star arrives at 6–8 with twelve or fourteen — so the gap between them narrows over a career, but only for the coach who pays to close it.

9 blue chips commit every week, weeks 2 through 12 — 99 for the whole league, all season. The mix is random: some weeks come up with four five-stars and some with none, so there is no safe week to look away and no clever week to save for. Every recruit's commit week is public from day one, and his recruitment is a two-step cycle anchored to it.

Read that last line twice: the fees are the risk, the bid is not. You can chase six recruits, lose five, and be out only the fees.

Pursuit is public, bids are secret. Under every name on the Entry page are the crests of every program in that race. Hover any crest to see what that program can still spend. You cannot see what a rival bid — but you can see what he is capable of, which is most of what you need. The whole race forms inside the one week before he commits, so the crests under a name are this week's news, not last month's.

Your recruiting coordinator has a read on every name. Under each recruit on the Entry page is one line from your staff — top target, stretch, depth, or don't bother — worked out from your roster, your bank and his published floor. It is advice, not an order, and it only knows what you could work out yourself: it never sees a hidden potential or a rival's sealed bid.

Ties go to the program with the worse record.

There are no second chances. A recruit nobody signs is gone — he does not come back on a later week. That is what makes the fee a real risk: pay to enter a race, lose it, and you have lost the man and the money both. It is also why the slate is always exactly 9, every week, all season.

Conditionals. On the sign step there is a checkbox grid. A box stays checked if landing that row's recruit should not change your pursuit of the column's. Uncheck it to say: if I get this one, stop spending on that one. It stops overlapping races leaving you with three linebackers.

Maximum to spend. A ceiling on what the sign step may cost you in total this week. Set 1,000, win one for 600, and your other bids are trimmed to fit the remaining 400 — so you can bid honestly on five men without risking the bank.

All Recruits shows the whole Board by week, and once a week resolves it shows who won each name and what he actually paid. That is your price guide for the next sealed bid.

At the season's start the engine flags three to five of your players as flight risks — buried talent, a good player stuck behind a better one. Each has a demand you can see and a private meter (0–100, starting at 50) only you can see. The league sees a status and nothing else.

Each week: demand met +8, missed −8, a win +2, a loss −2, and a little noise. Four weeks of effort moves him a full band — a change of heart in week 8 can still save him, a week-11 apology cannot. Meters freeze after week 12.

Public statuses: Locked In Happy Restless Portal Curious Testing the Waters Gone. Everyone's flight risks are on the public board, so rivals watch your unhappy tackle sour all November — and you watch them watching.

The roll. The week your season ends, each flight risk rolls: his chance of leaving is (85 − meter)%, never below 5, never above 95. Do everything he asked and he might still go.

About half an injury a team a game: most are rest-of-that-game, three in ten cost one or two weeks, and nothing lasts longer — no season-enders, and no player is sent home for more than two weeks in a season. Call it six a year, one or two of them costing games. The secondary and the offensive line get hurt most, then receivers and backs; quarterbacks rarely, kickers never. The odds are on the Engine Key.

This is what the roster minimums are for. When a man goes down the next name on your depth chart takes his snaps, carries and targets; an untouched chart plays best available. The engine also keeps a floor of healthy bodies at every position (two quarterbacks, six linemen, six backs in the secondary…) and at the floor an injury is rest-of-game only — you get shorter injuries, never an empty lineup. Every position minimum on the Requirements page sits above that floor, so a legal roster always covers it. What you are buying with a two-star tackle on Signing Day is not a starter; it is the week your starter sits.

Nothing follows the player. An injury never touches ratings, potential, price, portal tier or stars. An injured man in the portal is the same buy as a healthy one, and the offseason heals everybody, so no injury crosses a season boundary. There are no injury-prone players and no injury history to scout.

Flight risks and injuries. A demand is judged on your depth chart, not on who played. Leave the injured man in his slot: the engine skips him, his demand stays met, and he is back in it the week he returns. Moving a healthy man over him to cover the game is the one way to turn a two-week injury into a December problem.

After week 12 the postseason is either/or: the top sixteen by the final poll play a fixed bracket, and every other team plays exactly one bowl, dealt worst-to-best. The portal runs through all of it.

Nobody leaves a team that is still playing. Your flight risks roll the week your season ends and your leavers go biddable the week after. The worse your record, the earlier your bowl, the earlier your unhappy men hit the market. Reach the final and you keep every one of them.

Who can bid: everybody, from week 13. Being alive in the bracket freezes your players, not your chequebook — a team playing for the title bids on the same names as a team that finished 3–9, and an idle week is a shopping week for both. So the bracket costs you nothing at this market and pays you retention at the other one.

The entry fee burns on your first bid and is never refunded; the sealed bid is paid only if you win. You are buying film instead of a lottery ticket, which is what the premium is for. Ties go to the higher prestige. A league player nobody signs goes home to his old program — still mad, and back on the watch next season.

The tier is read off what he can do now, not off the stars he arrived with. That is the honest difference between the two markets: a name on the Board becomes next season's freshman, while a man in the portal can be any year through his fifth, already developed. How the tiers should line up against the recruiting bands is TBD — the cutoffs above are what the engine uses today.

When one of your players declares you get one offer, before he goes biddable. You see two numbers, and the madder he is the higher both are.

• The guarantee. Pay it and he stays, full stop. His base price by tier (400 down to 100) times his anger: 1 + (85 − meter) × 0.02. A man you benched all year costs about double; one who rolled unlucky while happy is cheap.
• The band. Offer 50–90% of the guarantee and he might take it — about 20% at the bottom, 85% at the top. Below 50% is an insult: automatic no.
• A rejected offer forfeits half its points, and he enters the portal on schedule where you may bid like anyone else.

Managers are happy with a guarantee. Cheapskates know the risk.

After the championship, before the new season. Whatever the Board and the Portal did not fill, you buy here.

No auction, no fees, no cycle. You choose the grade and the position — you do not choose the player. A generic three-star tackle is a random three-star tackle — same skill bands, same guaranteed specialty, same potential band as one off the Board. Five-stars are never sold here; those are only ever won on the Board. Anything you cannot afford to fill becomes a free walk-on. The Signing Day page is a planner all season, so you can see what your class will cost before October's spending decides it for you.

Prestige is a number from 1 to 10, on the Teams page, that moves every week toward the poll if you are ranked and your record if you are not. It does exactly one thing: break a tie in portal bidding. No discount on bids, no extra points. Brand decides the coin flips and nothing else.

There is no parity mechanism. Everyone earns the same, the bowl money goes to the mid-tier, the playoff pays nothing, and freshman ties go to the worse record. There is no catch-up money, no discount and no lifeline of any kind. Whether the league ever wants one is TBD — plan on the answer being no.

• Scouting. Spending RP to narrow a recruit's potential band is designed but not yet built — certainty on one target against pursuit of two. Coming.
• Help for a program stuck at the bottom. Whether the league gives one anything — and if so what — is TBD. Today it gives nothing.
• Portal tiers against the recruiting bands. The tier cutoffs are absolute skill numbers and did not move when the bands came down. TBD whether they should.
• Do conference champions earn anything in the bracket? For now the sixteen are seeded straight from the final poll.
• Postseason retention. A deep run keeps your unhappy players off the market until your season ends, and the two finalists never lose one at all. Whether that is too big an edge gets reviewed after the league's first December.
• Injuries from training. Pushing an older player may one day carry a risk. Not this season.