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Coaching Your Program

Program Prestige & Your Job Security

Two numbers hang over every season: your program's prestige and your own job security. They're related but not the same — prestige is the program's long-term standing, job security is whether you keep coaching it. Both move mostly on one question: did you meet the board's expectations?

Prestige Is the Program's Reputation, and It's Never Fixed

Prestige (1–99) is a rolling read on how strong your program is. It drives recruiting pull, sets the tone for donor confidence, and feeds directly into the win total the board expects from you next season. It moves every offseason, in either direction — a sustained run of good seasons lifts a mid-major into the sport's upper tier, and a sustained slide drags a blue-blood back down. Nothing is locked in at the start of your career.

A single bad season won't crater your prestige, and a single great one won't rocket you to the top. It's a slow-moving number that tracks a trend, not a one-year mood swing.

The Board's Win Target Is Built From Your Own Prestige

Before the season starts, the board sets a win target derived directly from your program's current prestige, with a small adjustment for how strong your roster is relative to your usual tier. A blue-blood is expected to win a lot; a rebuilding mid-major is graded on a shorter curve. It's the same number the Coach page and HomeView board panel track all season, so what you're being judged on is never a mystery.

The three outcomes are straightforward:

A deep postseason run — winning your conference tournament, reaching the Frozen Four, or winning the national championship — adds a further boost on top of whatever your regular-season record already earned. There's no downside version of this: a postseason run only ever helps.

The safety net: if you meet or beat your board target, your prestige and program legacy can't net fall that season, even if the postseason doesn't go your way. A team that wins the games it was supposed to win isn't punished for skipping a deep tournament run the board never expected in the first place.

The board's fuller in-season expectations — win total, reaching the tournament, winning the conference, producing a nationally-ranked scorer — are visible all year on your board-status panel, scaled to your program's stature. A blue-blood is expected to chase a conference title; a rebuilding program is graded on developing a single breakout scorer.

Job Security Is Judged Against That Same Bar

Every coach — yours and every CPU coach in the league — carries a job security score that moves every offseason. It starts comfortably high the day you're hired, then reacts to two things: how deep your postseason run went, and how your record compared to your own program's board target — the same bar prestige is judged against, so a blue-blood's coach is held to a tougher standard than a rebuilding program's.

As the user, three more things move your number that don't apply to CPU coaches: letting your NIL Collective finish the season in the red hurts you; recruiting your class efficiently — signing players near or under what the market demanded — helps, while badly overpaying across your class hurts; and winning the Spencer Penrose Award (Coach of the Year) is a straightforward bonus. Your end-of-season board summary lists every factor that moved your number by name.

Contracts, Counter-Offers & Getting Fired

You sign contracts in 3, 4, or 5-year terms. A multi-year deal buys protection — a coach on a bad run generally can't be dismissed mid-contract, only once the deal is expired or in its final year. If a higher-prestige program comes calling while you're under contract, your current school can counter with a raise or a bigger NIL budget to try to keep you.

If you opted into job security at career creation and you're dismissed, you aren't left without a job — a forced rehire screen lines up landing spots (programs roughly matching your coaching résumé, with a guaranteed fallback option so you always have a bench to stand behind) during the Coaching Carousel phase.

Every fired or retired CPU coach enters a pool of available names rather than vanishing. The same carousel that might fire you also recycles known coaches into new jobs around the league, so a strong coach let go by a blue-blood tends to resurface at another quality program rather than a random mid-major, and vice versa. A strong program will occasionally poach a coach straight out of a lesser job, too — that's the price of success as a CPU coach. Coaches also retire outright at a fixed age, which does more to keep the carousel turning year over year than firings do.

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