Just finished Year 1 of my first dynasty. Took UTEP to 8-4 as OC. Had 14 recruits committed at the end of the regular season, all 3*s with about 6 gems. Had a few more that we were leading for in their top 3.
Went into bowl season and accepted the HC job at Texas State (who went 4-8 and Kinne/CPU coach fired lol). I've seen several people say that the coaching carousel feels shallow in dynasty. I like a majority of the changes - having it in bowl season, being able to fire/hire your coordinators if you are the HC and then making offers to candidates and having to advance the week to see if you got them or not. The part I feel like most people are complaining about is that all of these coaches are fake and not real names. It definitely takes the fun out of the carousel. You see a whole bunch of names fired/hired but you have no real idea who they are or where they came from. When hiring coaches, getting these generated names doesn't feel as rewarding as going out and hiring names you know from the real world. Also, coaches don't really carry a logged history with them - so if I'm hiring a random OC, I can't see really easily where they were in the past or how their previous offenses ranked for example. I do feel there is a bunch that could be added in future iterations of this game that will make it feel way more fun and entertaining to us dynasty bros that care a lot about "realism" in the game.
Happy to report in my sim that A&M made the CFB playoff as the #2 overall seed as Big 12 conference champions (yes, I started my dynasty with custom conferences). tu went 5-7 lmao. The final four teams were Georgia, Oregon, Michigan and A&M, with A&M losing to Michigan in the semis and then Michigan eventually winning the whole thing over Oregon in the championship (in my custom conferences I moved all the Pac12 teams back, where they belong). So that final four and playoff result felt real for the sim.
Just getting to offseason recruiting/transfer portal. Scanned through which players left which teams, and most teams had about 3-5 players enter the portal. Some teams had like 10+, mostly due to coaching changes and loss of coach prestige or bad scheme fits (which again, actually feels like it models real life). I only had ~5 players leave the program I'm taking over, but if you got unlucky and had 10+ players in the portal, it could be a real year zero situation for your dynasty.
There has been a lot of online complaining about dynasty, but my n=1 experience hasn't been bad, other than I wish they had real coaches in the game.