Some reasonable wishlist items for EA Sports College Football 26

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

First, a note from our sponsors today, Teamworks:

Win the Rev Share Era with Teamworks General Manager
Teamworks GM equips athletic departments with the only integrated platform for navigating collegiate revenue sharing. Already adopted by more than 50 programs, Teamworks GM centralizes roster planning, budget forecasting, contract management, and athlete payments. Replace disconnected and generic systems with one intuitive, end-to-end interface. With teams already using the platform to budget for the rev share era, Teamworks GM provides the strategic advantage needed for success in college sports' new financial landscape. Learn more

Follow along with Teamworks and Extra Points as we explore How GMs are Building Championship Rosters.  Our latest update covered how the technology behind the GM role works. See part two of the series: Mid-Major Basketball GMs, explained, or part one, on the skills needed to be a P4 FB GM.

The internet has completely ruined my sense of time, so I sort of forgot just how much of my energy was spent reporting out the development of EA Sports College Football 25. It wasn’t just consumers whose interest for every little bit of game minute was ravenous…licensing professionals, athletic department personnel, agents, and plenty of other folks on the proverbial inside were just as fascinated.

It had been a decade since the last video game, after all. All those folks who played it religiously in college now had children and mortgages and knee pain and responsibilities that would keep them from throwing 300 hours into a San Jose State Dynasty. How would consumers respond to a new game?

Well, it turns out, they’d still buy it. So did almost everybody else. EA Sports College Football 25 sold a gazillion copies, obliterated industry projections, and helped reignite interest in college IP for licensed video games.

It was also something unique among EA’s recent football titles. Critics mostly liked it. On Metacritic, the game currently has an 83 Metascore, built from over twenty professional reviews. Madden 25 had a 70, and Madden 24 and 23 scored even worse.

I don’t think my review for Polygon (RIP) was rolled into any of those review aggregators, because I didn’t give the game a numerical grade at the end, but most of what I wrote last July still applies to how I think about the game. I really enjoyed it, and found myself playing it a lot, well after I no longer had to tell my wife and children that this was for work.

But it wasn’t a perfect video game. There were flaws, from the silly (the football stadium for ECU read ‘East California Pirates’ for like, the first week of release), to the frustrating (FCS teams were randomly overpowered in simulation logic) to the very frustrating (no formation subs? Broken Road to Glory playcalling?).

Consumers are going to get their hands on copies of College Football 26 later this summer, and I expect both EA and other journalists to begin to share more concrete info about the game over the coming weeks.

I’ll be honest with everybody. I know less about College Football 26 than I did about 25. Part of that is because the folks at EA and CLC got better about sharing information in ways that are not subject to my FOIAs. Part of that is because it simply wasn’t a reporting priority for me this year compared to last year, and part of it is because I know that a massively different product simply isn’t possible.

Even with staffers talking and working on CFB26 before CFB25 was even formally released, there’s just not nearly enough developer time to completely rip a sports game down to the studs and rebuild it. There’s time to add new features, fix bugs, rebalance simulations…but not to say, accurately depict the House settlement, include FCS teams, or construct an entirely new physics system.

So, knowing what I’ve learned about sports video game development, this particular project, and my own pain points….what would I like to see improved in CFB 26?

Glad you asked. Here are a few things on my wishlist that I believe are actually plausible.

But first, a message from our other sponsor, MTE:

Tired by day, tossing and turning by night?... Ditch the caffeine rollercoaster. MTE fuels clean, crash-free focus using nutrient-dense adaptogens, nootropics, and superfoods—while helping you feel good holistically.

• 11 natural ingredients scientifically proven to work in concert with each other and support long-term wellness

• Caffeine-free energy—no jitters and no crash without disrupting sleep

• Prebiotics support a healthy gut and improve daily wellness

• 3 delicious flavors with no sugar or artificial additives

500k packets sold. Try it with a 90-day risk-free guarantee. Get a healthy boost that works - Save 15% on MTE here.

Add in the rest of the stadiums…including the NFL ones

To the best of my knowledge, CFB25 included all but two of the main FBS stadiums. Northwestern’s awesome Lakefront Stadium became a reality far too late in the development cycle, so the Wildcats play at a version of the “old” Ryan Field in the game. Hawaii’s temporary stadium was not included due to a variety of miscommunications, so the developers built a generic stadium with Hawaii iconography for the Rainbows.

It goes without saying that I’d love to see both of those stadiums in the game, especially since it could be years before Hawaii has a more permanent stadium solution. Both Martin Stadium and the Ching Athletic Complex are unique game day atmospheres that would look excellent in full Playstation 5 glory.

But beyond that, EA already has license rights and models for every NFL stadium, thanks to the Madden games. I understand not including most of them in CFB25, since rendering accurate stadiums was one of the most complicated, expensive and time-consuming parts of making the video game, but now the CFB doesn’t have to make 136 new stadiums. They’d just have to make four (Hawaii and Northwestern, plus FBS newcomers Missouri State and Delaware). If you’ve got time, why not throw in every NFL stadium you’ve got?

If you add those games and the ability to proactively schedule neutral site games in Dynasty mode, you’d have a really cool new feature to build immersion. I want to schedule Georgia at Lambeau Field. I want to have a random late October regular season game at Highmark Stadium. It’d be fun!

On that note, it’s time to bring in the rest of the mascots. Including the Pop-Tart.

CFB25 did a lot of things right when it came to making each team’s home stadium as unique and realistic as possible. The game included the right turnover props, the right pregame festivities, the right alternate uniforms. But there were also a lot of mascots that didn’t make the cut.

And I’m not just talking about mascots at places like UAB or Ohio University. Multiple P4 programs, like Iowa and Kansas, didn’t see their mascots included.

I understand why this happened. Mascots are not easy to animate, and again, an awful lot of the developer team’s energies were spent on stadiums. But previous editions of the game, even back in the PS2 era, included just about all of the mascots.

I’d love for the play now Mascot mode, ‘Mascot Mashup’ to make a return. Because sometimes, you don’t want an especially realistic and complicated experience….you want to hop on the sticks and watch Brutus the Buckeye piledrive Otto the Orange into the next county. But if we can’t have that back in our lives, I hope that the latest game includes the dozens of mascots that were left on the cutting room floor of last year’s title.

And hey, if we’ve got a little extra space after all the mascots are uploaded…the bowl mascots should be included too. If we’re playing in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, the world needs a 3D version of the potato man. And if we’re going to play in the internet’s college football bowl game…then yes, it’s time to animate the ritualistic murder of the Pop-Tart man.

A stronger incorporation of NIL in the recruiting process…without making the game brutally un-fun

I’ve tried to convey this truth to fans of the game before. You don’t actually want a completely realistic depiction of college football roster management in a video game. It would not be fun. You think you want that, but “NIL Bagman Simulator” or “Head Coach Fundraising Simulator” would not be fun games. Or at least, it wouldn’t be the kind of game EA Sports can make if they want to keep the official licenses for colleges and conferences. We’ll throw those in the “ADS4000 Sequel Ideas” pile.

But you also can’t ignore NIL if you want to be even a little bit realistic. I understand why player compensation carried only a tiny impact on the flagship Dynasty mode, and honestly, a fairly marginal one in Road to Glory. Nobody really knew what the rules were, and they kept changing every few months. Collectives went from not being a thing to the dominant recruiting vehicle all during the scope of the first game’s development cycle.

Now? I guess they’re still a thing, but maybe not really? And there’s a salary cap? But in real life, you can mostly avoid it?

I don’t expect, or even really want, EA Sports to try to cram the college football version of Football Manager or OOP Baseball into their dynasty mode. But the recruiting world has changed so much since last July that I think there needs to be a significant change in how NIL is depicted in every game mode in order to remain relevant. NIL is more than just cutting commercials for pizza joints or signing autographs or serving as a stand-in for brand power. There probably needs to be some element of budget management and bag-chasing.

And finally, a few small quality of life changes

Listen, I was a former marching band dork. I love me some drumlines. But my friends, man cannot live on drum cadences alone. Puh-leease, can we use fight songs or other marching band music or SOMETHING besides the constant rap of a marching snare drum for menus? There are so many great marching band riffs that are part of the fabric of college football, that we do not need to box ourselves in with just the drums.

Basically, I’m asking EA to let the band play Neck. At least while I’m trying to figure out which recruit I’m scouting next week.

There are a few gameplay tweaks that would make life easier as well. If Wear and Tear is a major factor in EA CFB26, then I hope there’s an easier way to make formation or mass substitutions, especially if we’re up (or down) by 30 points in the second half. I hope there’s an ability to change the button format for the Option mechanics…because if you spent 12 years of your life pressing X to pitch, holding it feels backwards, even after 100+ hours.

And you know what? I’d love for a few bugs to get addressed in the Ultimate Team Mode, which I actually played. It would be fun to actually have access to the gazillion alternate uniforms in the rest of the game in UT, rather than being limited to a school’s primary home and away threads. It would be fun to be able to upload custom uniforms, or change fight songs, or even change the coach appearance. For as much as fans complained about limited cosmetic options in the Dynasty or RTG modes, it was even more bare bones in UT.

It looks like there will already be significant changes to the Road to Glory mode. There are smart people working on this game, and I know schools are very invested in trying to make the next release as strong as possible.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing it, whenever I eventually get my hands on a copy. I hope other people enjoy it too.

And if we’re lucky…we’ll all get to hear something other than drums while we figure the game out.