EA Sports College Football 25 Dynasty Mode Analysis and Breakdown

With the full reveal of dynasty mode earlier today, EA has made it clear that dynasty mode is the priority for EA Sports College Football 25. The depth here is impressive and there’s a lot to dig into.

But before I get into some of the specifics from the deep dive blog, I want to make an overarching point that I love that EA has embraced a sort of controlled chaos with dynasty mode. There will be clear checkpoints in the season you’re always heading towards (signing day, transfer portal, bowls), but most things discussed seem to have layers that allow for many permutations to play out.

The best way to frame that to me seems to be recruiting itself. In NCAA Football 14, there was not a great reason to focus on anything but recruiting (and really just players on offense, to be honest) because you could turn any team into a powerhouse in a couple years and there was no real downside to just focusing on recruiting. Now, while recruiting is still likely your most powerful tool, the world you’re in with users or CPU teams feels far more alive and full of “dangers” that could upend your recruiting plans.

Team Builder and putting house rules in place were great ways to keep dynasty mode fresh back with ’14, but if ’25 is creating more of these cascading moments that can play out in different way, more of the “fun” seems like it will be built into the game itself now. From coaching hires to recruiting to what team you select all will have various ups and downs built into them that should provide far richer stories we can tell.

It Starts With A Coach

One of the best ways to show that EA is trying to fuse NCAA Football 14‘s dynasty mode with NCAA Football 12‘s dynasty mode starts with their explanation about the coach creation process.

All of our research and discussions led us to build a coach experience centered around three goals:

• Just like the real world, no coach could be great at everything.
• A rock, paper, and scissors relationship between coach types with no dominant progression path.
• Coordinators and how you build your staff matter.

To me, this is a direct way of saying NCAA Football 14‘s model was a little too simplistic, but they want to keep things streamlined (if you want) while retaining some more of that week-to-week grind that existed in ’12. This is all created around the idea of picking and choosing your battles.

So you’ll be able to be more of a great recruiter or a great motivator but not both. It doesn’t mean you’ll be inept, but you need to rely on coaches and the built-in advantages of your school. All of this sounds great, and it honestly makes me wish we had even more than just a couple coaches on staff. It’s more of a thing in the NFL, but a cheat code for certain teams is having an offensive line coach who you pay extra because he turns guys into playable starters that were not able to be that elsewhere.

Point being, you’re going to be someone who evolves as a coach over time, but you’re never going to be evolving into the all-world freak who can do it all. You maybe have to fire a coach to strengthen up a weakness, or maybe the school your at just ends up not making sense for your strengths after a bit.

As complicated as some of this stuff is, I do also like that the expectations are straight forward: win.

School expectations are determined by the school’s current team prestige and program standing. The better the school, the higher the expectations. There are four types of contract expectations:

• Win (X) Games
• Win a Conference Championship
• Make the College Football Playoff
• Win a National Championship

Not every win will equal the same amount, but I do like that EA didn’t overthink this part of things. They’ve created enough chances for you to leave schools for other reasons, whether or not you get hired or fired is usually pretty simple. And, you can turn off coach firings if you don’t want to leave anyway.

Hop On The Carousel

When talking about the “controlled chaos” from earlier, here is where it really starts to shine to me. Oh, and obviously it’s great the coaching carousel is back in general. I know there had been some concerns at some point, but it’s here and does seem to be improved.

The “unknown” is very powerful in sports games, but it’s very hard to create something that’s interesting and exciting within a bunch of static screens. I can look to MLB The Show’s franchise mode this year as an example of that. Even if player signings were accurate and working correctly in the game, the idea of where a Juan Soto will sign in the offseason isn’t very intriguing right now in that game because you basically know the couple of teams and not much is going to really change there unless you insert yourself into the process to liven it up.

Here, while I won’t know until I play the game, this setup sounds very exciting. You can guess at what jobs might come free in the coming weeks, but you really don’t know where every coach might go, and you really don’t know what could happen over all five weeks until you get to it. The fact that some coaches might just jump to the NFL is a nice sweetener on top of it all, but that touch of realism has a purpose, which is to create more uncertainty.

It’s a delicate process to make things “more realistic” while also making things more fun, but I think here they’re on the right path. Added touches like programs having defined things they’re looking for also means certain jobs just won’t be open to you even if you’re an awesome coach. If I’m the Oakland Athletics, I shouldn’t be able to sign Juan Soto this offseason. And if I run an Air Raid offense, Navy shouldn’t want me.

Recruiting Feels Familiar In A Good Way

There’s a lot written about recruiting in the deep dive, but I actually don’t think there’s tons to analyze if you played NCAA Football 14 a lot. Instead, I think the way to frame it is “hey, just pretend this is NCAA Football 15 (not ’25) when it comes to recruiting.

What I mean is that EA clearly took our criticisms about how easy it was to recruit in that game, and from there put a lot of logical barriers in place to make it so recruiting is specialized in a way where you’re a bit “out of your league” depending on location and prestige.

Ultimately we landed on four core goals when building your program:

• Humanize recruits by giving them unique needs and motivations that the player has to discover by interacting with the recruit
• Differentiate regions of the country by player caliber, quality, and type to authentically capture high school talent based on historical real-world data
• Represent the different resources available to schools ensuring the top schools can blanket the country, while smaller schools will need to be more targeted with their approach
• Make the transfer portal feel authentically unpredictable

I’ll talk more about the transfer portal in its own section, but that’s obviously the biggest element of recruiting that has changed in real life. But for the game itself, it just seems like a focus on pipelines for both the school and coach will make it so certain players are mostly just off-limits for certain programs. The school’s pipeline does not change, and thus teams like Florida and LSU will always have certain advantages.

I think some may end up not loving this to some degree, but I think it makes sense. Dynasty mode in ’14 got pretty weird pretty fast with certain teams becoming way worse or certain teams getting new identities that didn’t really make sense within the first couple years. Between built-in pipelines and teams caring about having a certain style should mean powerhouses remain powerhouses — or at least stay true to who they’re likely to be even 5-10 years in the future.

Where EA went to the next level with the pipelines concept comes back to the players themselves:

How many people would care about this not being totally accurate? It’s probably not a ton, but it’s the perfect catnip for weirdos like us who will give them extra points for something like this. It shows a level of detail that just has not been present in most EA sports games in years. It sets a standard not just about quality and the pursuit of something special, but it shows these are people who care about the sport. I totally understand if certain developers just want to make a fun game — and, of course, that should still be the goal. But if you can find people who want to make a fun game, are capable of making a fun game, and then also care about the sport as well, that’s the winning formula for a sports game.

It Won’t Be Easy, Maybe

As a quick aside, I do also want to say I like that EA did mention that ’14 was too easy from a recruiting perspective (and also called out needing to use house rules). That they’ve added progression levels in so your coaches will get better at a slower rate if you want to take many years to get good at things is awesome. This is on top of adding in things like lower-rated schools not having as many recruiting hours available as powerhouses.

Again, all of this we won’t know how it feels until we play it, but it sounds like a reasonable way to tackle these concerns.

Fog Of War Is Always Tricky

Almost every sports game has some version of “fog of war” because most sports games have some sort of drafting/scouting component. I do not think there is one best way to do it, but I do know it’s one area where you’re likely never going to win everyone over. Here is EA’s explanation of how scouting will work.

Each attribute has 4 states of scouting:

• Unscouted: This is represented by question marks and is the default state for every recruit.
• Partially Scouted: At this stage you will see a horizontal bar appear. The left side of the bar is 0 and the right side is 99. Within the bar is a gold zone that covers 25% of the bar’s space. The player’s true rating for that attribute  is somewhere in this range. 
• Mostly Scouted: Once you have mostly scouted a player’s attribute, you have a much clearer picture of the prospect. At this point, the gold zone only covers 10% of the bar.
• Fully Scouted: When a rating is fully scouted, you know exactly how good the prospect is and their exact attribute rating is revealed.

I’m positive some folks won’t be stoked to know every rating from the “major” categories for that player’s skill position once they fully scout someone, but I don’t really have a strong feeling either way. I say that because you could still “house rules” it if you want and just “mostly scout” if you don’t want to know everything.

What EA has done is try to add a little spice with the “fully scouted” component by doing another relatively common thing with gems/busts.

Ultimately, the gem/bust system is more what I care about. They’re clear to say a five-star recruit won’t end up being a pumpkin, and the same goes for a one-star becoming a five-star stud, but it seems like they’re leaving open the possibility that lower stars have a little more “pop” potential for really shining. And this would make sense because if you’re going to now make it harder for less prestigious schools to ever become powerhouse recruiters, you need to find ways to make sure they can still accrue some impressive talent if they put the work in finding some diamonds in the rough.

And it’s not like what a player will become is a foregone conclusion even if they’re initially a gem or bust. Each player will have one of four development traits (that you don’t know until they sign), and the “skill group” setup seems smart as well:

So while the amount of “impact players” on a team won’t be capped, there are still some of these built-in caps on players to keep a lid on certain elements of an individual player. It kind of goes back to the coaching trees in that you can’t be a 99 across the board.

The Transfer Portal, And Beyond…

Like the coaching carousel or recruiting itself, the transfer portal is also going to happen over weeks. But like those two things, these are not playing out like each other and have their own mini-systems in place. I think it’s also worth pointing out what a break for the developers to have the transfer portal to play with now as well. Sometimes real life gives free wins to the video game, and being able to basically have another version of recruiting in the game is dope — thanks real life (and suck it Dabo).

The transfer portal has various on and off ramps and other things that play into it — like simply leaving to go pro (and sometimes trying to talk them out of it) — but I think mentioning Dealbreakers here makes sense.

This was called out during one of the recruiting sections in the blog, but I think it’s best mentioned here because it’s something like a “promise” from the old games, it just seems like the importance has been cranked up. And, look, it’s a cool thing. If college football is going to be more of a “business” now — or at least more clear about it now officially being a business — then sometimes you’re going to have to break promises if you think another player is worth pursuing. That EA has retained the promises from when you recruited these players all the way to the transfer portal is an amazing touch. There will be consequences to your actions.

Team Builder Gets Nerfed

One of the hopes was that Team Builder would maybe be a way for us to skirt around some of the rules that will be impacting player editing so EA does not run into legal issues in year one of this venture. While it’s still unclear how much we can edit prospects or players on teams later in dynasty mode, we will only have the ability to add 16 teams via Team Builder, and only in online dynasty.

The second part should not be too consequential because the online/offline aspect is mostly fused together anyway, but the 16 teams is the clear limiter here. The 16 teams thing feels more like a technical issue than a legal issue, but it does hamper creativity and put a ceiling on your online dynasties where you maybe wanted to involve more than 16 users.

That said, it’s really dope that EA included some of the FCS teams and named them after Team Builder squads that were popular in the creator community. It’s an appreciated nod to some of those folks like Bengal and Not The Expert who kept things fun and interesting (in addition to the obvious stuff like updated rosters and College Football Revamped).

Best Of The Rest

I could keep writing for hours, but I think at a certain point it’s best to point out some of the other highlights as a way to make it clear how much “love” is on display with this release. I’ve already gushed enough, and honestly it makes me feel uneasy to some degree because the game could still be bad — we still won’t know until its release! — but I think it’s still important to give praise to the little touches being added.

When it comes to players leaving school, finding out where they went in the draft is great. It’s a tease in a sense because we all want to import draft classes to Madden, but it’ still a nice way to stay connected to your guys.

After advancing the week, you will be able to see the pro draft results which show where players were drafted. When creating the pro draft results, we use real world data and pro draft trends to inform when players are drafted based on their OVR and position.

We knew conference realignments and buttloads of real bowl games would be here, but a small nod to the conference shifting is that EA has built in the patches on the jerseys updating. This was a small nuisance even in College Football Revamped, and it probably shows why it’s nice to have one of the devs of that project now on staff.

Moving conferences does not mean you are stuck with the old conference’s jersey patch for the logo on the 25 yard lines. Those will dynamically update based on conference membership.

To me, this says even more about their attention to detail than mimicking how college teams give out helmet stickers. Both are impressive, but one is on another level because it’s based on something you may never even do.

Finally, the touches with the future years of scheduling are something I expect out of OOTP or Football Manager:

It’s been a wild ride seeing all this coming together, and I believe we’ll have a Road to Glory preview up next from EA, but I do think this is the peak of my excitement. I am counting down the days and can’t believe we’re going to be playing college football within a couple weeks.