ORLANDO, Fla. — When EA Sports announced the return of its college football video game, the thoughts of many went to one place: Dynasty mode.
Instead of picking a pro team not too different from every other team, the NCAA Football video game franchise let players start a multi-year campaign with a national champion or lower-level team, collecting trophies or gradually working their way up the sport’s hierarchy.
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Last week, I was part of a select group of reporters and YouTube creators invited to EA Sports’ studios to test and learn about College Football 25. We were only allowed to play the game mode and could not test Dynasty or other modes. But we did take in almost three hours of presentations about the game, including Dynasty mode. Here’s what I learned.
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Players can coach up to 30 seasons, and dynasties can have up to 32 users either online or offline. Online Dynasty Mode does not have crossplay capability between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Custom conferences are back: Gamers can move schools around and put up to 20 teams in a conference. They can’t create new conferences from scratch, but they can build the Pac-12 back up if they’d like. They can choose the number of league games that conferences play and change the location of the conference championship games. All future nonconference games scheduled out in real life show up in this game, even the distant home-and-homes into the 2030s. Players can create new nonconference games but can’t put them at neutral sites. Week 0 is a new addition to the game, but the quasi-regular game played in Ireland is not an option. Generic FCS directional programs are in the game, but no real FCS schools are (many FCS schools have publicly complained about their absence).
As in the old game, you begin as a head coach, offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator. Real coaches are not in the game, though Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin has said he’d give away his likeness to be in the game for free. Considering every single coach would love to be in the game for recruiting purposes, perhaps we’ll see real coaches in the future. But that will require another licensing fee from EA.
As a Dynasty coach, you give yourself a backstory as a “motivator,” “recruiter” or “tactician,” utilizing 11 skill trees for coaching abilities. You can grow the skills, but you can’t be great at everything. You also manage your coordinators and have the opportunity to fire them after the season and poach new ones from other schools.
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Did you know the NCAA Football series had a playoff option for a few years back at the turn of the century? (I bought an old PlayStation version of NCAA Football 2001 last year and tested it out.) College Football 25 will be the first game to incorporate the actual College Football Playoff, and it’ll offer fans their first experience of a 12-team field, even before the inaugural season for the format begins. ESPN’s Chris Fowler explained in Orlando that recording broadcast audio for a playoff format he’s never called before was a unique situation.
The four-game redshirt rule also exists, so the “Games Played” stat will be worth keeping in mind when managing your roster and. (There will be no sixth- or seventh-year seniors in this game.)
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The recruiting process is deeper than ever. Each class includes 4,000 prospects, including Athletes, who are back in the game, but you cannot create a prospect. Coaches have a certain number of hours to commit each week to scouting and recruiting, and a team can sign up to 35 players. They can encourage players to transfer to bring the roster under 85 scholarships, which essentially works like cutting them because they can’t decline it.
Some pipelines have narrowed to include cities, like Atlanta. Some recruits have “Dealbreakers,” meaning there are simply certain things that five-star recruits want that smaller schools can’t meet. You once again will have the option to “Send the house” in recruiting and throw a lot of hours at a kid. It’s a stage-based process, where you try to keep your school above the recruit’s cut line.
NIL does not exist in Dynasty mode. “Brand Exposure” has replaced TV exposure and serves as the NIL stand-in during recruiting pitches. The explanation from EA folks was that the NIL landscape changes seemingly each month, and they didn’t want to commit to something only for it to change. Plus, you know, pay-for-play is still against NCAA rules.
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Recruiting visits can be fashioned specific to what a player wants. If playing time is one of his biggest motivations, he can sit in a position meeting room. Inviting multiple quarterbacks to visit on the same weekend could hurt you. There is risk and reward to certain weekends: A win against a bad opponent won’t help you as much, and a loss could hurt your standing. A win against a good team will help.
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Instead of working like free agency, the transfer portal is woven into the normal recruiting process after the season. When this part of the calendar arrives, you’ll have to split your hours between high school recruits and transfers (the latter of whom are not available during the season — no tampering). Prospective transfers have star ratings, and their recruiting process works much like its high school counterpart. A few years into your dynasty, new computer players in the portal may remember whether you recruited them out of high school.
Service academies can take transfers the same as everyone else, even though it doesn’t exactly work like that in real life.
At the end of each season, coaches will be faced with more players than ever who want to go to the NFL or transfer for reasons such as playing style or pro potential and given the chance to persuade them to stay.
To answer a question I received quite a bit, you cannot export College Football 25 Dynasty draft classes into Madden. EA only has players’ license for their college likeness, not their NFL likeness. Although players join the NFLPA and the associated license early the next spring, they’re not added to Madden until the late summer in the new game.
This will still be the case years into your dynasty after all the real players have filtered out. You won’t be able to export computer-generated classes, either. You can, however, export your Road to Glory player to Superstar mode in Madden.
Team Builder is in the game, but we didn’t get any information on it other than what’s been announced. You can design your own uniforms, helmets and field and upload a logo. More details are still to come.
Dynasty mode was the part of the game I wanted to test out most, but it wasn’t made available as part of last week’s event with the game still under construction. This is not a review of the game, because our gameplay was limited. But when I get this game, one of the first things I’m going to do is find some Group of 5 program and start to build my way up. College football has changed so much since it last had a video game, and that’s evident in how Dynasty mode has changed with the portal and more.
EA Sports officials said Dynasty and Road to Glory were two foundational pillars of this game. We have not yet seen it in action, but the early glimpses look promising.
(Screenshot courtesy of EA Sports)
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Chris Vannini covers national college football issues and the coaching carousel for The Athletic. A co-winner of the FWAA’s Beat Writer of the Year Award in 2018, he previously was managing editor of CoachingSearch.com. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisVannini
