What’s in College Football 25 Dynasty Mode? Everything we know

ORLANDO, Fla. — When EA Sports announced the return of its college football video game, many people thought of one place: Dynasty Mode.

Instead of choosing a professional team not too different from other teams, the NCAA Football video game franchise allows players to start a multi-year campaign with a national champion or lower-tier team, collecting trophies or gradually progressing through the ranks. hierarchy of sport.

Last week, I was part of a select group of journalists and YouTube creators invited to the EA Sports studios to test and learn more about College Football 25. We were only allowed to play the game mode and could not try Dynasty or other modes. But we saw nearly three hours of presentations on the game, including Dynasty mode. Here’s what I learned.

The basics

Players can coach up to 30 seasons and dynasties can have up to 32 users online or offline. Dynasty Online mode does not have cross-play capability between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Custom conferences are back: players can move schools and bring up to 20 teams into a conference. They can’t create new conferences from scratch, but they can rebuild the Pac-12 if they want. They can choose the number of championship games played by conferences and change the location of conference championship games. All future non-conference games scheduled in real life appear in this game, even the distant homes of the 2030s. Players can create new non-conference games but cannot place them on neutral sites. Week 0 is a new addition to the game, but the near-regular game played in Ireland is not an option. Generic FCS directional programs are there, but no real FCS schools are (many FCS schools have publicly complained about their absence).

Like the old game, you start as the head coach, offensive coordinator, or defensive coordinator. The real coaches aren’t in the game, even though Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin said he would give up his likeness to get into the game for free. Since every coach would like to participate in recruiting for recruiting purposes, we’ll see maybe -be real coaches in the future. But this will require additional licensing fees from EA.

As a Dynasty Coach, you give yourself a story as a “motivator,” “recruiter,” or “tactician,” using 11 skill trees for coaching abilities. You can develop your skills, but you can’t be great at everything. You also manage your coordinators and have the ability to fire them after the season and poach new ones from other schools.

Did you know that the NCAA Football Series had a playoff option a few years ago around the turn of the century? (I bought an older PlayStation version of NCAA Football 2001 last year and tested it out.) College Football 25 will be the first game to incorporate the real College Football Playoff and will give fans their first experience of a field of 12 teams. , even before the start of the format’s inaugural season. ESPN’s Chris Fowler told Orlando that the broadcast audio for a playoff format he had 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.)

Recruitment

The recruiting process is more thorough than ever. Each class has 4,000 prospects, including athletes, returning to the game, but you can’t create a prospect. Coaches have a certain number of hours to devote each week to scouting and recruiting, and a team can recruit up to 35 players. They can encourage players to transfer to bring the roster down to less than 85 scholarships, which is essentially cutting them because they can’t turn it down.

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 satisfy. You will once again have the opportunity to “send home” during recruitment and dedicate many hours to a child. This is a step-by-step process, where you try to keep your school above the recruit selection line.

NIL does not exist in Dynasty mode. “Brand Exposure” replaced TV exposure and serves as an NIL replacement during recruiting pitches. The explanation from the EA folks was that the NIL landscape changes seemingly every month, and they didn’t want to commit to something only for it to change. Plus, you know, pay to play is still against NCAA rules.

Recruiting visits can be tailored specifically to what a player wants. If playing time is one of his biggest motivators, he can sit in a post meeting room. Inviting multiple quarterbacks to visit you on the same weekend could hurt you. Some weekends come with risks and rewards: a win against a bad opponent won’t help you as much, and a loss could damage your reputation. A win against a good team will help.

Transfer portal

Instead of operating like free agency, the transfer portal is integrated into the normal recruiting process after the season. When that part of the schedule comes around, you’ll have to split your hours between high school recruits and transfers (the latter of which aren’t available during the season — no tampering). Potential transfers are star-rated and their recruiting process works much like high school. A few years into your dynasty, new portal computer players may remember if you recruited them out of high school.

Service academies can accept transfers the same way everyone else does, although 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 before who want to join the NFL or transfer for reasons such as their playing style or professional potential and will have the opportunity to persuade them to stay.

Export class drafts?

To answer a question I’ve received quite often, you cannot export College Football 25 Dynasty draft classes to Madden. EA only licenses players for their college likeness, not their NFL likeness. Although players will join the NFLPA and associated license early next spring, they won’t be added to Madden until late summer in the new game.

This will still be the case years after the start of your dynasty, after all the real players have filtered through. You will also not be able to export computer-generated courses. You can, however, export your Road to Glory player to Superstar mode in Madden.

Team Builder

Team Builder is in the mix, but we haven’t gotten any information about it other than what was announced. You can design your own uniforms, helmets and fields and upload a logo. More details are still to come.

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Dynasty mode was the part of the game I most wanted to test, but it wasn’t made available as part of last week’s event as the game was still under construction. This is not a review of the game, as our gameplay was limited. But when I get this game, one of the first things I’ll do is find a Group of 5 program and start progressing. College football has changed so much since its last video game, and that’s evident in how Dynasty Mode has changed with Portal and more.

EA Sports officials have said that Dynasty and Road to Glory are two fundamental pillars of this game. We haven’t seen it in action yet, but early previews look promising.

(Screenshot courtesy of EA Sports)