Once Dynasty monetization was removed, College Football 27 felt like what I wanted from last year's game

I really was not ready for the start of football season this year. Part of that is the fault of NFL Fantasy Football, which migrated its leagues to ESPN's fantasy app, but waited till the 11th hour to actually enable the ability to transfer. I got the email about it in the spring, and was just kind of waiting to get further instructions from the NFL on how to do the migration. Those instructions didn't come until like the end of July, only a couple weeks before the start of the NFL preseason.

This delay in setting up my fantasy football leagues this year meant I wasn't really thinking about football, and didn't even bother looking for cheap copies of College Football 27 on eBay when the game released. I ended up buying my used copy off eBay a whole month after the game's release. In fact, it was so late, that I received the game in the mail the day before Madden 27's official release. So I'll probably be late about getting my pre-owned copy of that too.

Being a month late, I apparently missed a whole lot of a drama with the game's launch. From what I've read, the Dynasty mode nerfed experience gain for players and coaches in order to sell XP boost micro-transactions. Without those micro-transaction XP boosts, users report that it would take 150 seasons of undefeated national championship runs to get a custom coach up to max level. (The game only supports 50 years of Dynasty Mode)

Things were so bad that apparently content creators and influencers (even the Ultimate Team ones!) were in active rebellion and recommending boycotts. EA back-tracked ... partially. The XP boost micro-transactions were removed, and the names of the Coach XP sliders were renamed in order to obfuscate whether a "fast" option is included or not. So maybe XP gain is back to normal, or maybe it's still slower than in past years. I don't know. Worse yet, EA still kept a paywall for certain coach skill trees.

It actually teaches the game this time?

Upon finally receiving a copy of the game, I jumped into a quick exhibition match with last year's national champs expecting to feel right at home and breeze to an easy victory, and to start my reviewing process with the impression that the game hadn't changed much. I did breeze to an easy victory, but that had more to do with playing as the reigning national champs instead of anything I was doing. Instead, I actually felt surprisingly out-of-place. A lot of simple things from years past were different. For example, the commands for shifting defensive linemen and linebackers weren't mapped to the controls I expected, and I generally had no idea what any of the defensive pre-play controls did, because so many of them were moved, combined, or had unfamiliar commands in their menus. The buttons to view wear & tear weren't where they used to be, even though a quick trip to the setting menu confirmed that wear & tear is still in the game. And so forth.

So the next time I played, I went to the Training menu, expecting to be disappointed by a measly list of un-helpful mini-games that would force me to go to the internet to figure out where all the familiar commands had been moved to, and what new commands might be present. What I found instead was an exhaustive suite of tutorials, including an entire menu dedicated specifically to mechanics and features that were new this year, or significantly changed from previous years. On top of that, the tutorials showed subtle, but significant design improvements over the Madden counterparts that I had been familiar with for years.

In general, these Skill Trainer tutorials lacked good feedback for what you might be doing wrong, if you are failing to execute the commands being tutorialized. In fact, when I got to the tutorial for the new timing-based catching mechanic, I was kind of stone-walled. There was no on-screen indicator, dial, or gauge of any kind telling me what to press or how long to press it. My receiver kept catching passes, but I wasn't given credit for executing the timing catches, and the game wasn't giving me any feedback on what (if anything) I was doing wrong. So I hopped on the internet and searched for "College Football 27 perfect catch tutorial not working", and immediately found a reddit post explaining that, by importing last year's settings, the timing-catch mechanic is disabled by default. That's right, the game's most significant and heavily-advertised new feature was disabled by default! I had to quit the Skill Trainer and turn on the timing-catch setting. Then, suddenly, the tutorial started working, and the rest of the Skill Trainer drills were mostly smooth-sailing and were highly informative.

Some of the drills were even improved considerably over their Madden counterparts of years' past. For example, the "block kick" tutorial removes all the players from the field, except for the snapper, holder, kicker, and the 1 defensive player being tutorialized. So you don't have to worry about failing the drill as a result of being blocked by the O-Line on a bad die roll. You have a free path to the kicker, and can trivially press the button to block the kick. And hey! There's even a tutorial for "new" kicking meter that was introduced 2 years ago and was insanely difficult. Except, ironically, kick meter timing seems to be much more forgiving this year -- or maybe I've just gotten used to it?

These tutorials also taught me about powerful and exciting mechanics that are either brand new in this years' game, or which have been in the game for a while, but I didn't know about them on account of the fact that the previous games never bothered to tutorialize them. For example, there's a button to cause the nearest A.I.-controlled defender to leave his coverage assignment and pursue the opposing QB on a scramble. Is that a new feature this year? There was also a tutorial for the "block disengage" button, which is something that I had accidentally learned about last year, but which last years' games never bothered to tell me existed. And I was really eager to start playing around with the new "Custom Defensive Adjustments" feature.

During the 2 hours that I spent in the Skill Trainer tutorials (that's how many drills there are!), I was actually kind of dumbfounded that I was starting to think "wait a minute, is it possible that this year's game is actually significantly improved in ways that I specifically wanted it to be improved? Did EA actually put effort into this release? Could it actually be ... dare I say ... good?"

Coaching up the game

While I was in the game settings screens, I also noticed a bunch of other new settings and features that I don't recall seeing in previous years' games. I can now change camera angles for different in-game events or situations, such as changing the Coach Cam, pass zoom cam, kicking camera, and so forth, all independently of each other.

There's even a new Coach Mode that allows the user to call plays and watch the CPU execute them, complete with a bunch of customization settings for just how involved in the game you want to be. You can even watch the action from a dedicated sideline camera! Sadly, there's still no dedicated spectator mode that lets you just watch the match while the teams use their A.I. gameplans. The Coach Mode also isn't available from the match setup or team-select screen. You have to go into the Main Menu's Settings in order to enable Coach Mode, even if you just want it for one game!

Perhaps the most interesting of the things I found in the settings and menus were the Coaching Adjustment settings and the Custom Adjustments menu. These are perhaps the most game-changing new features that serve as both ease-of-use features and also legitimate football coaching tools.

Gone are the days of having to make the exact same Coaching Adjustments in the play-call menu at the start of every match. Now, all of these adjustments settings (and more) are on their own dedicated sub-menu of the game settings, so that you can set your preferred A.I. adjustments once, and go into every game with your offense and defense behaving how you want, and only change them if the situation or matchup requires it.

Do you like to play up-temp offense? Want your fastest DBs to cover the opponent's fastest receivers? Do you prefer for your A.I. defenders to contain the running back on pitch options, so that you are free to attack the quarterback with your user-controlled defender? Well now you can set that as the default behavior in the settings screen instead of having to do it in the play-call screen during every single game.

Furthermore, there is a new menu that allows the user essentially create "macros" of multiple pre-play adjustments, and combine them all into a single controller input. Now users can counter particular meta strategies by quickly adjusting their offense or defense if they see those strategies being employed at the line of scrimmage. You don't have to go through the process of selecting multiple defenders and assigning new coverage hot routes to them, shading coverages, shifting linemen or linebackers, and so forth. Most or all of that can now be pre-configured in a menu, and activated with a single command at the line of scrimmage.

Custom Adjustments has a lot of un-tapped potential. As is common with EA's sports games, Custom Adjustments is a great idea that just is not well integrated with the game's other features and modes. Neither Coaching Adjustment settings or Custom Adjustments are in the Dynasty settings or coaching tabs. If I want to change any of these settings, I have to exit Dynasty entirely and go to the Main Menu's Settings screen, then load back into Dynasty. And if I don't want these settings to be applied outside of Dynasty matchups, I have to remember to go back to Settings and reset everything to defaults before playing another game mode.

This is a shame, since I can imagine a Dynasty system in which, each week, the user is given a scouting report for an upcoming opponent, with the ability to create or modify Custom Adjustments based on that opponent's tendencies. It would be similar to setting coach skills in Madden 26 Franchise based on your opponent's personnel or tendencies, except this would be a lot less abstract and much closer to how actual football gameplanning is performed on a weekly basis. It's like EA is so close to giving us something that feels like truly coaching a football team, but always gives up and says "good enough" before they get to the finish line.

The missing little things

So far, what I've talked about has been a lot of the "little things" that I expected to see in last year's game. None of these changes are huge on their own, but they add up to make the product as a whole feel more robust. That isn't to say that every little nagging issue with the game's menus and presentation are fixed.

Despite all the new tutorials, there is still no screen that explains what all the in-game icons mean. There are in-game menus that define all the abilities and their icons. There's a menu that shows all the celebrations you can perform. There's an entire screen dedicated to just showing ads and promotions. But there is no screen or menu anywhere that defines or explains all of the in-game icons that appear. Like, what do these colored arrows with pips mean? What does the white icon of a player holding his hands up to his head mean? I know what most or all of the defensive read icons mean (because some of these are explained in the Skill Trainer), but what is the difference between the red "C" icon and the blue "C" icon over a defender's head? What is the difference between the yellow half and the green half of the circle under the selected player's feet? I know that this is wear & tear and stamina, respectively, but other users might not know that, and it isn't explained anywhere.

And like, I'm not asking for any complicated tutorials for this stuff. Literally all I want is a screen, similar to the Abilities menu, that shows each icon and tells me what it means. Preferably one that is accessible from the pause menu within a match.

Halftime commentary is also still an absolute joke that is frequently wrong. For example, I've heard the color commentator talk about the offense consistently getting chunk plays in a 3-0 Army-Navy game in which neither offense had put up 50 yards by halftime. But there was like one 20 yard run play, and the halftime analyst makes it sound like the whole offense was unstoppable all half. And no, I wasn't playing some super-short, 2-minute quarters. It was 8-minute quarters (which is even longer than the default), and neither team had accumulated 50 yards of total offense after 16 minutes of football.

EA also apparently doesn't know what the word "alphabetically" means. Advancing alphabetically in the team-select screens sometimes skips to arbitrary teams that start with the corresponding letter. For example, if you skip to the letter "N", the game doesn't take you to Navy, which is the first team, alphabetically, that starts with the letter "N"; instead, it takes you to North Carolina State (abbreviated NC State). The letter "S" is even worse, as it goes straight to "SMU" instead of "Sacramento State" or any of the handful of teams who's name starts with "San".

Dropping the sure catch

As for the aforementioned timing-catch mechanic that I had to explicitly enable in the options menu, I was very quickly tempted to disable it again after a few exhibition matches. I think the fact that this feature was disabled by default shows one of 2 things: either EA has no confidence in this timing-catch feature; or they know that it's really only for hardcore, competitive players, and they couldn't be bothered to make it functional for everybody else. In either case, they were right.

Thankfully, there is a setting that changes the receiver behavior to be more automatic. This can be enabled if you want the timing mechanic to be more optional, or you can enable it for a more hardcore competitive multiplayer experience in which using the timing mechanic would be required for pretty much any pass to be complete. There is also a setting to change how deep down the field the pass has to be in order for the timing mechanic to kick in. This way, the game can be configured such that quick slant, drag, or hitch passes do not require using the timing mechanic, but deeper passes like digs, post, and streak routes will require it. So EA definitely seems to have learned its lessons from the debacle that was Madden 18's "Targeted Passing" mechanic.

Regardless of a couple of assist features, my expectation is that most users are going to either turn this feature off entirely, or set the receivers to be automatic and then just ignore the timing mechanic in the vast majority of gameplay situations. Then throw their controller in frustrating when they habitually hold X to make a sure catch in the endzone, only to hold it for too long and watch the meter turn red and the ball get dropped. The onfield action is just way too fast for most people to be able to consistently process this.

My opinion of the game further soured when I tried playing my first Dynasty game against a no-huddle team, and I was rudely reminded that the developers at EA are catering to competitive users playing 6 minute quarters, instead of simulation gamers wanting to play more realistic-length games. Teams running the no-huddle will sprint up to the line of scrimmage and snap the ball almost immediately, often with 27 or 28 seconds still on the play clock, and with no fatigue or increased chance of procedure penalties for the offense. And there are no settings to tweak CPU no-huddle tendencies, or the immediacy with which CPU QBs snap the ball in general.

This isn't how the no-huddle works in football. The point of the no-huddle isn't to have your offense sprint down the field every play and exhaust themselves. Heck, it's not even necessarily about exhausting the defense. The point is to prevent the defense from being able to substitute, so that you catch them in a favorable match-up. And if they happen to get tired and play sloppy in their assignments or technique, then even better! Real life teams that run the no-huddle will still snap the ball with 20 or less seconds on the play clock. So it does run faster than a normal huddle offense, but still 30-50% slower than what College Football 27 does it.

There needs to be a setting to slow down the no-huddle offenses. Offensive players should be jogging to the line of scrimmage and spending time calling out the new play, instead of sprinting to the line, glancing at the sideline for a second, and immediately snapping the ball with 28 seconds on the play clock. Maybe there can be a button to make them sprint, but it should incur a huge fatigue penalty and should also increase the risk of false starts, illegal formations, illegal motions, and other procedure penalties (which the game doesn't currently model at all).

And if EA can't do this, then they need to provide users with an option to literally just turn the no-huddle OFF entirely. Not running the no-huddle at all is still more realistic than the broken-ass no-huddle that is in the game, which dramatically inflates the number of plays run, scores, and stats.

These are the sorts of legacy problems that are game-breaking for simulation-style gamers. These legacy problems always make it impossible for me to whole-heartedly recommend or endorse any EA football game, because these problems have been in the game for over a decade now, and EA shows no signs of interest in ever fixing them.

But that isn't even the worst problem. The worst problem is crashes in the 4th quarter and post-game of my Dynasty games. I fell victim to a particular hard crash that other players have linked to using Mass Substitutions. But even if I avoid using Mass Subs, there was still the potential for the "Refreshing Spreadsheet" glitch to soft lock the game while viewing post-game stats. I guess I could work around this as well by avoiding post-game stats screens and instead waiting to look at the box score after loading back out to the Dynasty Hub screen. And I better make sure that I don't try manually saving the game right after winning a rivalry game or championship, because apparently manually saving too soon after returning to the Franchise Hub causes trophies to not be added to your Trophy Case.

Yeah, all these bugs can be worked around (if you know about them), but the fact that simple, mundane actions like substituting players in a blowout, looking at game stats, or saving the fucking game can cause crashes or lost progress, means that I cannot trust the game to perform basic functionality correctly. I go into every Dynasty match with a degree of anxiety regarding the risk of a game-breaking or progress-killing glitch wasting hours of my limited play time, and that this is still the case over a month after launch!

Finally caught up to modern NIL reality

Having missed out on the aggressive monetization and pay-walling that was present in the launch version of Dynasty, I found myself feeling pretty good about what the new Dynasty Mode was offering.

The lack of any representation of NIL was a huge, gaping omission in College Football 25 and 26. I guess for College Football 25, they had the excuse that NIL was still brand new, and nobody quite new how it would affect the sport. But by College Football 26, the lack of NIL in the game just looked lazy, and there was no excuse for it to be absent. It took 2 years longer than it should, but NIL is actually in Dynasty mode now.

I also like that it's an abstract point system, instead of a menu that requires giving players specific dollar amounts of salary. This helps separate College Football from Madden, and also helps to keep the game feeling more about football and not about the shady business aspects of modern football.

There is also finally the ability to manage weekly practice reps for players on your roster. This is something that also felt painfully absent from the last 2 years' games, and its inclusion makes Wear & Tear feel more like something that the user actually has to manage and strategize around. Wear & Tear doesn't only affect the player's ability to play on the field, but it now also affects their development, as holding them out of practice for "maintenance" will mean they get less experience points. The system even allows the user to declare that a specific player won't play in the upcoming game at all, which automatically removes them from the depth chart for that week. Again, it would be nice to get a scouting report that tells me which players my opponent is holding out of practice due to injury, so that I can prepare accordingly, but whatever.

Weekly practice can also affect players' confidence levels. There's still value in practicing a player who might already be an upper-classman with capped (or near-capped) skills. Even if he won't be able to level up his skills any further, a confidence boost can still lead to better play on the field for that one week.

There aren't any training mini-games, like in Madden, so this is all just a big spreadsheet, and much of it can feel automatic. It's still good to have, since this all gives the user something to do and think about between weeks that isn't just recruiting, and which actually affects how your team plays this week and this season.

There's even a pre-game weather forecast for outdoor games! This is such a simple little thing to add, but it's been something that I've been asking for for years and never showed up in Madden. It goes alongside some improved weather and lighting effects, which can now change during the course of the game, with rain or snow coming and going, or getting more intense as the game goes on. Because there aren't any scouting or gameplanning features, there isn't much that the user can do in preparation for a match in inclement weather, but I guess you could modify your Coaching Adjustments, substitution strategy, or playbook if you really want to.

Probably the least bad that it will every be

If this had been the game that shipped last year (without the micro-transactions or game-breaking glitches), I would have been very happy. I might even have scored it in the B range. So many of my own personal complaints have been addressed, some of which are things that I've been asking for Madden to do for a decade (or longer). The fact that College Football pulled off, in just 3 years, things that Madden couldn't do in 15 years gives me some optimism for the future of EA's football games. But this isn't last year, and so I still feel like College Football 27 is a little bit behind the curve, since it took us 2 years to get here.

But then I look at the sleazy money-grubbing shit that EA tried (and largely failed) to sneak into the game, and that the overall on-field gameplay is still catered towards short, arcade-style play, and any hope or optimism gets dashed. Paywalls and micro-transactions in Dynasty is apparently on the table now again. They're just going to keep trying until gamers get exhausted of complaining about it, and things are just going to keep getting worse from there. As such, I have this horrible sinking feeling that College Football 27 probably represents the peak of what EA's sports games will ever be. And it's not even a very high peak, at that!

I am curious how much, if any, LLM Generative A.I. was used. Maybe the quantity of included wishlist features is the result of a bunch of desperate developers and designers actually putting in effort, out of the fear that they're going to lose their jobs to A.I. if they don't deliver a well-reviewed product? Or maybe they delegated all these relatively simple tasks to A.I., which allowed them to check more items off the wishlist?

I also wonder if A.I. was used to determine what to put in the game to begin with? It kind of makes sense. Generative A.I. is very eager to please, and if it was trained on internet forums, YouTube videos, social media, and blog posts from the player community, then I would kind of expect that it would include features that users had specifically asked for on the internet. But then the executives had to go and fuck it all up by trying to monetize every last corner of the game. If all that is the case, then it would seem that the LLM A.I.s that are literal "heartless soulless machines", still somehow care more about what gamers want than the heartless, soulless -- but still supposedly "human" -- executives in charge at EA.

Maybe all my blogging and YouTube critiques have finally started paying off. Maybe somebody -- or something -- is actually listening now?