EA Sports College Football 26 by developer EA Tiburon and publisher Electronic Arts—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.
We’re back with the sophomore season of EA’s return to college football. Last year was a triumphant return for the former long-running sports franchise. It’s easy for games to hit sophomore slumps, and this can be especially true of sports titles due to their tight annual release cycles. Thankfully EA Sports College Football 26 manages to build upon its strengths without taking any discernable steps backwards.
Last year’s release of the game was a breath of fresh air for me personally. As most who follow the EA football titles are aware, for various reasons the college football games took a roughly decade-long hiatus and last year was a return for the series. Now in the years prior, I generally gravitated more towards the pro-centric Madden franchises, but last year the script flipped for me. Simply put – I enjoyed college football more than its pro sibling for a variety of reasons.
Now we don’t yet know what this year’s Madden will look like for a couple of months, but I can say that College Football 26 made numerous small but smart improvements over what was already a really good release last year. Firstly, I want to talk about the gameplay and presentation because they’re the core of what is experienced regardless of the mode being played.
The pageantry of actual stadiums, team fight songs and recognizable mascots feel authentic. Hearing my actual college’s fight song before every home game is just… incredibly nostalgic, as someone who attended a ton of sporting events back then. The in-game sound, music and animations continue to improve as well. The sound design is excellent – crank it up and feel the ‘Stadium Pulse’ when you’re in a massive stadium for a top twenty team and you can just feel it as the screen shakes and the receivers start to confuse their routes. There is a big difference between a seasoned senior on the road in these situations and a wet behind the ears freshman in the same environment.
The gameplay feels very similar to last year, which is to say it is well paced when compared to the Madden series, and frankly a bit more fun most of the time. The differences between players is far more notable here. In Madden there’s actually quite a bit of team parity, where as with all of the schools represented in College Football 26, there’s greater discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, which can lead to some fascinating and downright nasty mismatches. If your team only has one or two standout players, you had best figure out how to get the most out of them.
At first glance, defense seems like it may have taken a small step back this season, because big plays don’t seem to happen quite as often. But as I spent more time with the game, I began to realize that it was more nuanced than that and often came down to how good the player is. This is a reference to the above. A player with better awareness seems to get their head around more often in the secondary. A defensive back with a lower awareness can still deflect the pass or hit the receiver as soon as they catch the ball, but I began to notice that the better awareness players who actually visibly turned their heads to watch the ball come in had a better chance of getting both hands on the football and creating an interception. Higher awareness just seemed to have better timing (and tackling ability as well), creating more big hits on the catch attempt and jarring the ball free instead of just letting the receiver come down with it. These are small details but ones that feel good once you get used to them and start to understand how the players differentiate from one another.
As for the modes – if you played EA Sports College Football 25, you have a pretty good idea what to expect here. Generally speaking, you have the same things as before, such as quick play (which is where you will unlock several of the trophies / achievements), Ultimate Team (the microtransaction-heavy mixture of fantasy football and sports card collecting as you open packs for players to put into your lineup), Road to Glory (create-a-player mode), Dynasty (a years-running franchise mode), and Road to the College Football Playoff (an online competitive mode).
Some of these modes have seen minor tweaks: a couple more quality of life options for quick play, better menu navigation and a few more challenge varieties available in Ultimate Team and scouting / better home field advantages in Road to the College Football Playoff. All of these are welcome, but the bulk of my time is almost always spent in the Road to Glory and Dynasty modes.
For Road to Glory, the immediate big change is the introduction of high school games before college. This is a really cool new feature, in part because I feel like you are getting to craft a bit more of your story through it. You can cultivate a list of colleges you hope to play for, as you try to find the right balance of playing time, ability points, potential NIL deals and more. Just because you want a college, it doesn’t mean that college wants you – you need to pique their interest. Last year you could pick what kind of a recruit you were – but purposely going one star underdog didn’t really yield anything interesting, it was just making your life more difficult in college. Here you can still pick if you’re a highly sought-after recruit going into your senior year of high school, but then there’s game day objectives you get to play out. Succeed at them, and you can boost your ranking, opening you up to more colleges and better scholarship opportunities.
So instead of playing entire games and just trying to put up super gaudy numbers in high school, you are given objectives such as ‘get three first downs’ or ‘rush for 10+ yards out of RPO sets’. Doing these tasks successfully improves your player’s stock and encourages more colleges to take interest in you. It all culminates into your final scholarship offers and which of your three top schools you plan to attend, complete with a hat picking ceremony that is just a bit more flair to enjoy. Then you dig into college life, which plays out rather similarly to last season, where you have to balance your grades, your teammates’ respect, social media influence, And of course your actual skills on the field through the next three or four years before heading to the NFL draft where I assume once again your player can get drafted into this year’s Madden NFL career mode.
There were a handful of quibbles to be had, though overall the experience is far better for the high school addition. I do wish there were a couple more player positions available (especially defensive lineman, which is what I usually play on defense in other modes). Also a handful of the high school objectives simply didn’t work even when completed with my quarterback (though I didn’t see that happen with my running back or linebacker). This usually presented itself when I would use the no huddle offense, and it didn’t happen every time but there were instances where I absolutely completed the objective (throw for 20+ yards, and I would complete one for 40+ and a TD) and it didn’t ‘take’. Thankfully you do get a handful of ‘retry’ options each game, so that took the sting out of those rare glitches a bit.
Another oversight is when you are asked to perform a specific type of action – but there’s no details on how to perform said action in the request. Additionally, you can’t see controller inputs in the pause menu during the high school days. So you might be tasked with executing a specific type of play, but having no idea how to pull it off in-game. This was fine for someone like me who has been playing the EA football games for decades, but isn’t particularly welcoming to newer players.
The Dynasty mode is where I spent the bulk of my time last year, and it’s clear that’s going to be the case again for me this season. I came back to College Football 25 last year a few months later – something I almost never do with sports games once I feel like I’ve been ‘done’ with them for a bit, and dove right back into my Dynasty mode then and I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens again with this year’s title. It’s that good.
Some are pretty obvious and in-your-face such as the return of the trophy room, where you can view various virtual awards globally across modes. Then there's the pursuit of college records. There are others that are a bit more subtle. These include tweaks to coaching and player progression. I appreciate the addition of a manual progression option for players, as it's a great way to develop the players how you'd like. This however, does dovetail into a concern / quibble of mine that I'll get to a bit later.
Recruiting gets some additional reconfiguring that are huge – the transfer portal (and the number of players looking to transfer) is kind of insane. It’s actually a pretty accurate reflection of real life, where around 2,000 players enter it each season, but it’s also jarring to see a really good player on my team win the Heisman as a sophomore in an offense that clearly features his skill set wonderfully leave because of ‘poor system fit’. It feels like there’s room for improvement / depth here still. The recruiting list is still a bit of an eye chart, with lots of columns of data, but I appreciate the quality of life improvements that make certain things much more obvious (such as if the position is projected to be a need next season, or if you’re in the top 5 or 3 for a recruit). Other changes are smaller or less well explained. Two that come to mind is the ‘sway’ option that tries to convince a recruit to shift their priorities to something that might better suit your program. The other was less ‘recruiting points’ needed for visits to the campus the closer the player is. It makes total sense in retrospect but at first I did not comprehend why one recruit required 40 points and another only 15.
All in all, Dynasty mode is an absolute banger this season and I have had a ton of fun with it. However, there is likely to be one glaring oversight that plagued last year’s game and will no doubt bum out veteran players such as myself again this year. I speculated in my review last year that you wouldn’t be able to export draft classes from College Football into Madden NFL because of the complication of NIL deals and how the players in the game get paid for being there. I would imagine that from a contract standpoint, they’d get double if they were to show up in another game.
Now I get that for some people, the player and coach authenticity from their favorite colleges is likely very important to them – I enjoy it as well. However, I would personally rather have generated rosters that I can continue into the Madden franchise a couple of months later. That would add serious shelf life for both franchises, for both myself and my friends (and a quick look on Reddit indicates similar feelings from a *lot* of players there as well). It circles back to my earlier comment about growing players the way I’d like. Often times that growth can be somewhat slow, and it takes time and effort to get them the way you like, just for them to be gone after three or four seasons. If I were able to see them continue their journeys into Madden NFL, I’d be considerably more invested in the players than I am now knowing that they will be virtual vapor after a few seasons. If EA Sports truly wants to create a football ecosystem between their two franchises, they need to figure this Dynasty to Franchise flow, as the created player feels like a half-measure at best. Now I haven’t seen it confirmed that this will be a problem again this year, but I suspect if they were going to provide this feature, we’d have heard about it by now. We haven’t, so until proven otherwise I’m going to have to assume it won’t be in this year’s release just like it wasn’t in last year’s either.
In the end, EA Sports College Football 26 is almost everything you’d want from an annual sports title. There are a couple of rough spots and one rather glaring missing feature, but last year’s release was a very solid foundation and this year’s iteration does a great job of improving upon it in almost every respect. This is the second year of the reborn franchise, and they avoid the sophomore slump this season – but there is still room for more growth in the future. Let’s hope that the developers continue to build on these strengths, but this year’s release is a worthy one for fans of the franchise.
Score: 8 / 10
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