My biggest unanswered questions about EA Sports College Football 26

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Quick reminder: I, along with the entire Extra Points team, will be headed to Orlando next weekend for NACDA. I’ll be in town from around 11 AM on Sunday the 8th until the evening of the 10th.

If you’re in town, I’d love to chat! Our team is giving free demos of Extra Points Library to anybody interested, but I’m also trying to catch up with sources, do a little good ol’ fashioned professional development, and shoot the breeze. Drop me a line at [email protected] if you’re around!

In non-NACDA news, yesterday was the official Trailer Release Day for the follow-up to last year’s spectacularly success, EA Sports College Football 25….EA Sports College Football 26. If you’re the kind of person who is interested in this sort of thing and somehow missed it, I’ve got you.

The trailer was accompanied by a long blog post which details the various major improvements and changes to the game. EA also invited a handful of reporters and YouTube personalities to come to Orlando and play an early build of the game. Unlike last year, I was unable to attend the event, although several of my colleagues have already shared some of their early thoughts. As various embargos clear from the event, I expect more information will trickle out over the coming weeks.

I know that an awful lot of people read Extra Points last year to learn as much information as possible about the game’s development. I’m still working to get answers on some of the biggest questions, but if you are most interested in learning whether a particular song made this year’s game, or how the new physics-based tackling works, I would defer to my friends who have actually gotten their hands on the sticks at this point. I haven’t played the game.

But after watching, reading, and asking around the industry for the last few weeks, I still have a few unanswered questions about this year’s game…questions that are more big-picture in scope.

How will consumers, and the industry at large, react to college coaches finally being included in the game?

Last year was the first time that actual, current college athletes had their NIL included in a college football video game. It was a massive undertaking, as more than 11,000 real people had their likeness depicted. If there’s been another video game in history that included likenesses of so many real people, I haven’t heard of it, and neither has EA.

EA CFB25 had real players, real mascots, real stadiums, real logos…but did not include real coaches. EA CFB26 will be the first edition in the series to change that, as developers say more than 300 coaches will be included. So that’s not just most of the head coaches, but also most of the offensive and defensive coordinators.

As of right this second, I do not know exactly how EA pulled this off. I don’t know the licensing agent for the coaches, I don’t know what kind of contract they got, how much they earned (if anything? Lane Kiffin famously said he’d do it for free), if they get a royalty rate, etc. I hope to better understand this in the near future.

But beyond that, I’m very curious what this will mean for the game’s consumers, and how it might impact future non-athlete, non-university IP decisions.

Here’s the thing. The most commonly played game mode for any of the college football video games is the Dynasty mode, where the user takes over a college football program, recruits players, hires staff, and eventually tries to turn Louisiana Tech or Kent State or even Purdue into a five-star signing powerhouse.

In this mode, you’re the coach. Is the fantasy for the user to play as "themselves?”, or a fictionalized version of a coach, or are users actually clamoring for the chance to play a Joe Harasymiak simulator?

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