EA SPORTS College Football 26

I put nearly 500 hours into College Football 25 and was still playing it until mid-June. That’s a testament to how much I love this series, but also how much I missed it after a more than decade-long hiatus. Now that EA’s College Football franchise is back, and all is right in the world once more, we’re back to getting the traditional annual release. College Football 26 had a tough act to follow, but I’m already well on the road to spending another 500 hours with this year’s game. There are some key issues that EA needs to iron out, but they’re bugs not features, so it can be fixed. There’s no denying that 26 feels and looks even more authentically like college football than last year, which is the biggest upgrade across the board.

Leading up to release, EA made a big deal about making College Football 26 look and feel more like the real thing, and I think they’ve accomplished that goal extremely well. More real-life stadium atmospheres, in-game traditions, walkouts, turnover celebrations, mascots, and more. The level of authenticity this year reminds me of the old EA Sports tagline: “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game.” Finally. There are even real coaches in the game—more than 300—which you can also utilize in Dynasty mode if you choose.

But it's not just the atmosphere and pageantry that are more authentic, it’s the on-field gameplay as well. Put simply, College Football 26 is the best-feeling football game I’ve ever played. If you played last year, it won’t take you long to realize that EA spent a lot of time refining player locomotion, animations, collision physics, run blocking, and tackling. Even the way defensive players act before the ball is snapped looks for more realistic than before. Gang tackles look real now, with players tackling in a way that makes physical sense. The initial tackler may be holding on for dear life when the secondary tackler comes over and knocks the offensive player over. It’s hard to explain on paper, but it looks and feels right in-game. Add quarterback throwing motions to the list too, which are far more natural now, and the ball comes off the hand in a much more realistic way.

My two favorite improvements to gameplay this year are the much-improved ability to run between the tackles, and defensive backs no longer being able to intercept the ball without ever seeing it. Both changes couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Elusive running backs maneuvering their way through the trenches is very much a staple of real college football, but something that did not feel viable in CFB 25. There’s an even greater emphasis now on choosing your holes and hitting the gap. In fact, I wouldn’t really recommend using the sprint button until you’ve reached open space as it limits your maneuverability quite a bit. I love the way running the ball feels in this game. So much so that my first dynasty (the first of many) in CFB 26 has been with Air Force, running the triple option, which means I throw the ball maybe 10 times a game.

Sound has noticeably improved as well from last year. Tackling sounds much better, and actually like football pads hitting football pads. The in-game soundtrack has been vastly expanded, with lots of school fight songs and some licensed marching band covers of popular songs. Thanks, EA, for getting Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” stuck in my head all over again. But they’ve got to do something about my man Kevin Connors, whose studio updates during games are absolutely brutal to listen to. Go ahead and fill out your bingo card of which former player he is going to reference for whichever school he is reporting on. EA, please write the poor guy some better lines for next year—he's in desperate need of a glow up.

Okay, so what about those bugs I referred to? Yeah, there’s a couple of nasty ones lurking beneath the surface, like a maggot inside a gorgeously ripe strawberry. Let’s start with the Wear and Tear system, which is completely broken at the moment, to the point where I recommend that you disable it entirely. When I set up my dynasty, I didn’t touch the Wear and Tear settings at all. Everything is on default, just the way it came. Doing so has made the fourth quarter of every game almost unbearable to play. By that point in the game, players are getting injured nearly every play, for both teams. Which means that you’ll be substituting players constantly, but more importantly, the game clock stops every time someone goes down.

So, let’s say you’re up 7-3 on your archrivals at the Army’s West Point Academy, and you have the ball with a few minutes left in the game. You change your settings to chew the game clock so you can run out the clock and escape with a big win. But players are dropping like flies, after each run play the clock is stopping, and Army never has to use a timeout. The game clock isn’t dwindling down to all zeroes like you need it to, but you keep calling run play after run play. Then disaster strikes. You fumble the ball, which Army recovers and returns for a touchdown to ultimately win the game. You want to snap your controller in half, but you remind yourself that a new DualSense is $80. “That’s a lot of baby diapers,” you caution yourself. You get up and go visit with your one-year-old instead to cool down. Wow, doesn’t that sound infuriating? Not that I would know or anything, but EA, I’m begging you to fix the Wear and Tear system. I like the feature and the strategic layer that it brings to the game, but it is not tuned correctly in its current form.

You may have ascertained that Dynasty mode is my preferred mode in College Football 26, as it always has been over the years. That’s where I began and continue to spend most of my time this year. It is the deepest and most rewarding of all the modes, with the others being Road to Glory, College Ultimate Team, and Road to the College Football Playoff. This year, you can elect to begin your dynasty as the incumbent coach at a school or create your own. Thankfully this year, you have more than two clothing options to choose from and get to pick your sideline demeanor and adaptive AI scheme—I’m a calm, playbook-wielding system coach.

There are several new additions to Dynasty mode this year, including the return of the Trophy Room to view your collection of accolades as the years fly by. Here you can find rivalry trophies, conference championship trophies, and hopefully, national championship trophies. You can also now manually upgrade players on your team, though it does come at an overall skill point penalty. Most relevant to Dynasty, but ubiquitous across the game is the addition of new player archetypes for the various positions, which add a level of depth when building your program and considering how you want to play on the field. For instance, last year, running backs had three archetypes: physical, elusive, and receiving. Those options have been greatly expanded and seem to matter more. In CFB 26, running backs can be a contact seeker, elusive bruiser, east/west playmaker, north/south receiver, north/south blocker, or backfield threat.

These archetypes not only matter on the field in relation to your style of play, but also on the recruiting trail, which itself has seen some quality-of-life improvements. You can now see your team needs at the top of the recruiting page without having to bring up a separate menu. Additionally, prospect recruiting visits are now different point values based on their location relative to your school. So, a kid in Colorado (the Air Force Academy is in Colorado Springs) might only cost me 10 recruiting points to schedule a visit, while someone in Maine would cost the full 40. It brings the regionality of real life recruiting to the game, where schools have recruiting bases and established pipelines that they tap into year after year. The transfer portal has also been expanded, with thousands of players hitting the market each offseason. Recruiting has long been the most addicting part of Dynasty mode, and it feels more refined in CFB 26 for players who like to spend a lot of time with it.

Moving over to the Road to Glory career mode, I ran into the second infuriating bug that often left a sour taste in my mouth. Seemingly exclusive to this mode is the inclusion of semi-braindead running back AI. If there is an open hole to run through, your running backs are sure to ignore it and run straight for the nearest defender more often than not. I’m not sure if it is affected by which position you choose as a player or what the deal is exactly, but something is wrong here. Not only does it affect you in real games, but also in practice drills, which is particularly maddening since you’ll rely on these drills sometimes when fighting to move up the depth chart.

I created myself as a two-star, dual threat quarterback, looking to earn my way into a starting role on a college team. After flirting with 10 teams for the first few weeks of my high school season, I narrowed my list down to Buffalo, Vanderbilt, and Rice. The game projected I would be the starter at Buffalo, so it was their hat that I placed on my head during my signing ceremony. To my surprise, I didn’t break into the starting lineup until my third season on campus. The coaching staff at Buffalo took another quarterback in the transfer portal who started ahead of me, which, is actually pretty realistic. In year two, I took part in no less than eight position battles for the starting quarterback job, all of which I failed because of that questionable running back AI. I came to dread when the next position battle would pop up. Eventually, all I could do was laugh at how comically stupid my running backs were. It’s not much better when the games count either, at least in Road to Glory, which is also frustrating since you cannot control what plays you run until your coach trusts you more. It was not fun.

Between games, practice, and fighting for spot on the depth chart, you will upgrade your player with skill points, study for exams, go to team functions, steal your buddy’s girlfriend, skip class, and sign NIL deals. Ah yes, the full college athletics experience. Road to Glory is fun distraction when I needed a change of pace, but it couldn’t rip me away from trying to build Air Force into a National title contender for very long. That’s more of a personal preference than an indictment of the mode but knowing that my running backs didn’t have my actual back was a bit of a turn off too.

The other two modes available are Road to the College Football Playoff and College Ultimate Team. Neither really moved the needle for me, if I’m being honest. Road to the CFP reminded me of the Seasons or Co-op Seasons mode on the FIFA games, where you play games against human opponents and try to climb to higher skill tiers. College Ultimate Team is your standard card-based team-building mode that you see in most other sports games. Content-wise, it is surprisingly robust, with lots of single-player and PvP game modes, limited time events, and challenges. Everything you play earns coins, which you use to either buy card packs or purchase a card you want directly from other players in the auction house.

My biggest hurdle with the mode is that there are so many schools and players, that I don’t know who most of them are. Oh wow, John Doe is a 79 overall wide receiver who played at Texas Tech in the '90s? Cool. Never heard of him. These card-based modes are far better on the professional sports games, where the pool of teams and players is much smaller, much more recognizable, and much easier to get invested in. In fact, it is my favorite mode on 2K’s NBA games, and I think it’s because there is a lot more satisfaction in having a highly rated Kobe Bryant card than a highly rated John Doe card in College Football 26. It’s just not my cup of tea in CFB 26, I’m afraid, and that’s okay. It’s for somebody.

We don’t often get annual sports game releases that feel like a significant upgrade from the last game, but College Football 26 certainly feels like an upgrade, especially in terms of gameplay. It makes significant strides in authenticity, both on and off the field. The addition of real college coaches, more playbooks, and more school traditions takes you closer to the real college football experience than ever before. On the field gameplay refinements to player locomotion and animations make it a dream to play, depending on which mode you’re playing. The Wear and Tear system and AI in certain modes both need massive tuning updates, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to spend another 500 hours playing College Football this year.