College Basketball Is Returning and Madden 26 Franchise Mode Takes Shape

When this newsletter launched last year, the original vision was to recap the week that was, and while I’ve now turned it more into a “feature of the week” type of deal, it feels right to go back to our roots for this edition since we’re about to hit our one-year newsletter anniversary and there was a lot of news this week.

This is because EA dominated the news cycle all week:

• Announced a College Basketball series will be returning

• Gave us a Madden 26 franchise mode deep dive

• College Football 26 early access kicks off on July 7, and we got a long look at gameplay this week

College Basketball Is Returning (In 2028)

So far, it looks like EA is going to stick with the same game plan that it used to very successfully re-launch College Football. This means there is going to be a long runway, and the announcement this week was basically the announcement before the announcement. You might not remember, but College Football was announced way before it was even a twinkle in EA’s eye. EA essentially went dark for a year after the initial rush of news, and the game was delayed an extra year, so there was a three-year gap between the announcement and the game’s arrival.

I give you the means to hit me up with comments, thoughts, musings, or questions for all things related to this week’s news or anything else. You’re free to explain why no one can ever top Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl, or talk about why Tin Cup is underrated as a sports movie — any and all are welcome. If I get enough responses, I’d love to feature them in future newsletters or in “mailbags” of our own.

Here is the e-mail: [email protected] (and bonus points if you also include your city, name (or alias), and some sort of subject to go along with your thoughts.

It’s fair to suspect the same sort of turnaround for their basketball game, and it’s probably even more expected this time around because there is no in-house sports game to steal from this time. EA has not officially said when the game will launch (in part because it doesn’t seem like a deal is technically finalized), but Matt Brown (the original reporter on the story) did mention 2028, and that is what everyone is running with for now.

2K got in on the fun by hinting at a college basketball revival as well, but that excitement gave way to some deflation in the same day, and it always seemed sort of out of pocket for 2K to even tease a college basketball experience since the original reporting in Matt’s newsletter seemed pretty clear it was an exclusive licensing deal with EA.

To be clear, it does seem like exclusivity was EA’s idea. The CLC (basically how you acquire most of the college licenses) asked for bids, and EA’s won. As part of the bid, it seems like EA wants exclusivity, and Matt expanded on that in another newsletter this week by saying this:

There has been some theorizing maybe 2K just expands its college offerings within NBA 2K (maybe with an expanded MyPlayer mode that incorporates a deep college experience), and that’s certainly possible, but I would imagine they still need to go through certain licensing channels to go that route. The CLC also had the right to say no to exclusivity and take another offer, but it seems like that did not happen either (and Take Two/2K could have asked for the same exclusivity for all we know).

For as much as EA gets hate (rightfully so much of the time, and by asking for exclusivity here), my mildly spicy take is I do think this is the better outcome if the CLC was always going to be open to an exclusivity deal rather than trying to get money from multiple partners. As much as College Hoops 2K8 eats the lunch of any EA college basketball game that ever came out, I’d always prefer two different companies offering up a form of the sport rather than just one.

And that original tweet is correct in saying exclusivity doesn’t help anyone but the publisher, but the reality is the companies bidding might not want to bid a lot if they don’t get that exclusivity window because a college basketball game is especially risky considering the past failures of these games. Flooding the market with more games is good for us, but publishers probably don’t want to take the gamble if they’re not going to have a chance to at least corner what was already known to be a small market compared to college football, especially when considering today’s licensing and development costs. The CLC probably realizes that as well, and thus to get a good offer the exclusivity tag is tied to it.

Beyond that, my other mildly spicy take is I’m just never sure how committed 2K/Take Two really is to sports games these days. We’ve had tons of stops and starts with NFL 2K teases, and Take Two has come off as very risk averse in the sports game space for most of the last decade. Plus, they gave up on College Hoops 2K not for exclusivity reasons but for sales reasons — that was a case where EA had nothing to do with it. They do have the WWE 2K game that comes out yearly, but otherwise it’s an every-other-year for PGA 2K and then a Top Spin 2K every so often. They don’t seem to care much for a yearly sports game grind outside of NBA 2K anymore, which stinks.

That all being said, it’s very easy to assume that people would likely be feeling way more confident about this college basketball revival if 2K was doing it rather than EA. Say what you will about NBA 2K’s quality in the last couple years, EA hasn’t made this specific game in 16 years, and they haven’t made a truly good basketball game in 20+ years. I know a couple of the final NBA Lives have some fans, but those people were still in the minority, so the last “solid” NBA Live was probably NBA Live 10, which is fitting since NCAA Basketball 10 was the same year. But I would personally not even put that game in the “good” category.

For me, the last “golden era” of NBA Live stops after NBA Live 2005, and I think they went the entire HD generation without ever finding their footing again. Be that as it may, we do have a couple breadcrumbs for what EA is thinking with the game, and their heart is in the right spot in terms of what they want to include.

For those who don’t remember a game from 16 years ago, College Basketball 10 had the same positives that NBA Live had at the time, which was some very good ESPN integration. It really did help the presentation, but it just wasn’t a good gameplay experience once you got past that presentation.

EA struggled forever trying to deal with the locomotion of basketball games, and it wasn’t just the graphics and animations that didn’t live up to what 2K was doing at the time, it was pretty much everything. The presentation in NCAA Basketball 10 was the closest they got to something special, but even so, there’s a reason the series stopped after ‘10. Again, college sports weren’t yet in trouble from a legal standpoint back in 2009, but 2K and EA stopped making college basketball games due to weak sales — not legal problems.

Games have only gotten more expensive since then, and licensing costs for players is obviously a new expense, so it’s also not shocking to hear EA is reserving the right to go every other year with releases:

But the landscape has certainly changed in 16 years as well. There are fewer sports games out there, and there are obviously barely any basketball games of note beyond NBA 2K. It’s also undeniable that having the real players in the game is a hook. As much as OS was and remains a hotbed for custom rosters, people who go that route were only ever a sliver of the pie. It also obviously doesn’t hurt that College Football 25 truly was a smashing success — even if that series was also always held in much higher regard (and sold better) than EA’s basketball offerings.

The interesting thing to track will be finding out who is helping to lead this project, and how big the team will truly get. We know NBA Live has been in various forms of incubation over the years, so will any of the old Live games exist anywhere in this new game, or will this truly be a fresh start? And it will be interesting to see if this is made at EA’s Orlando studio (like the old games were at the end) along with its football games, or will it head somewhere else in the end? It is worth noting that there are people like Rob Jones and Scott O’Gallagher who currently work on College Football (and Madden), but they’re also old NBA 2K developers who left that studio to come work at EA’s Orlando studio years back.

Madden’s Franchise Mode Is A Tale of Two Experiences

The Madden 26 franchise mode deep dive really hit home how this year is a tale of two experiences: the head coach experience and the GM/owner experience. The head coach experience is where a vast majority of the focus went, and the crumbs seemed to go towards the GM/owner side of the equation.

You can’t do it all in one season, so I don’t disagree with the idea of making week to week games flourish more and make the actual games themselves have more weight. I have said from the start that Madden’s franchise mode has a lot of problems, but it starts with the gameplay. It has to be fun and interesting playing out the games, and it has not been. Teams are too similar, the league feels too boring and dead, and there’s just not a lot of interesting stuff you’re doing for games each week. EA is attacking those areas in ‘26, and we’ll see how it goes, but I think “trusting the process” isn’t a bad phrase to hit on here if you want to believe in how EA is going about this.

But, yes, as I read through the thousands of words, it was also very clear that the team management/business side/GM side is an afterthought for this year. The owner mode aspect of things has been a lost cause for years and that would be a multi-year investment to bring that back to the forefront, but I think giving the GM side of things more life is what they’ll need to attack next year. This is trades, cap management, roster management, drafting (and compensatory picks) — all that good stuff.

I do like how they tried to explain what’s going on with the sim engine, and it should be music to all our ears the way they finally addressed the elephant in the room by confirming it was playbooks that were screwing things up. Something like that does show they’re at least listening, and so I’m sure they’re well aware that while it’s cool that teams will draft in the trenches more and progression/regression is getting some love, the GM side of things is very weak right now overall, which is especially noticeable when the offseason rolls around.

They’re also banking on presentation carrying a lot of weight, and it is indeed sweet that the Halftime Report and Weekly Recaps will show CPU highlights and highlights from other user games in online franchises. My guess is they’re generating the CPU highlights based on play data and just re-creating it from that. They could be doing it the super old-school NFL 2K5 way and just filling your hard drive with a batch of pre-generated highlights (which is why you needed a hard drive for that game back in the day to get the actual moving highlights), but I’m going to assume they’ve been able to get one step beyond that by now.

(As an aside, generating highlights was something we were talking about even when I was at EA for the first iteration of the halftime show. We wanted to be able to generate highlights “from the cloud” and were poking at the tech, but it just wasn’t viable at the time, so we stuck with just doing highlights from the game you were playing.)

What I did find slightly curious is there really wasn’t mention about your own game. I suppose the Halftime Report will just be about other games, which I don’t hate, but it’s certainly a choice. Again, to cite my own experiences working on a feature like this, it was a challenge at times to pull intriguing highlights and tell a “story” of the half, and it’s absolutely cooler to get highlights from around the league if you have to pick between the two either due to not wanting to keep players in the halftime show for too long or because the show doesn’t come off as well when you show highlights from the ongoing game.

With the Weekly Recap, that will include your highlights as well as ones from around the league, but it does feel a little underwhelming since there was no mention of Player of the Week, or MVP updates, or Playoff updates, or anything that really adds an extra layer to what should be in a Weekly Recap show. I would assume that’s the next step, but EA is really banking on the highlights from the CPU and other user games being the selling point for Year 1.

By the way, TJ With MGN Gaming also released a cool concept video showcasing how they would craft a Sunday Night package since EA will have a knock-off Sunday Night experience in their game:

(My take is even if NBC doesn’t want to give their presentation package to EA because they’re not using the same broadcasters, or EA doesn’t want to pony up the cash for NBC’s graphics/music package, there’s a lot of great stuff here and a good benchmark for when EA does show their full Sunday Night presentation package in ‘26. It also shows the power of having more than just a couple “wipes” or overlays to use for an entire presentation package and that EA’s art team should invest in that sort of stuff today, tomorrow, and the next day.)

On the sidelines, there’s a ton of stuff going into coaching trees, your coordinators, and everything else dealing with the head coaching side of things, so I want to end with one other positive and one negative thought coming out of this deep dive. Well, okay, I want to make one declaration as well that I assume the Coach Storylines/press conferences are going to suck again — and Rich Eisen recapping your crappy storyline/press conference will add nothing minus it being cool that it’s Rich Eisen — but that’s neither here nor there.

I’ll lead with the positive and say I think it’s a really smart tweak to make it so you can lose progress with some of these abilities:

But I will add-on and say I continue to dislike ideas like “pass for 300 yards twice” being a benchmark. It’s not a good goal because yards don’t mean shit a lot of the time (how many passes did it take and so on as well), and anything that tries to force you to play a certain way is usually doing more harm than good if it just results in you playing the game like a checklist.

Along those same lines, I get what EA is going for with the Gameday Abilities, but so many of these seem to be very broad, which just means they’re going to either go unnoticed or people are going to end up thinking some are broken if anything negative still happens:

I understand the strategy part and building your squad out for the opponent you’re about to play, but more focused is better I think with stuff like this. We’re never really going to know if an offensive tackle did better or worse because of the Trimmed Edges ability. It’s a win or lose outcome play, and it’s a no-win scenario as a developer because if the offensive lineman insta-loses off the snap, then the user is immediately going to be chapped and think it’s a useless ability. It’s also not very interactive. We picked an ability, but it’s something that’s probably only interesting as a choice for simulated games rather than the ones we play out.

By comparison, I love the idea of Playsheets:

While on some level, it has the same issue as Gameday Abilities by being very broad in terms of just giving general attribute boosts, it’s more focused on specific plays, and so it feels far more strategic and much easier to focus in on as a user because we have actual input every time we choose to select something from the Playsheet. I think gameplay ideas that tap more into “playsheets” and less into very broad buckets that are less definable down to down are far better in any setting, but especially a franchise mode setting.

Overall, if you don’t like playing every game or getting through a lot of seasons, then this deep dive probably didn’t enthrall you. But if you’re someone who just wants sim stats to work better and to have more reasons to play the games, then it should excite you.

College Football 26 Early Access Begins On July 7

To wrap this up, this is just a reminder that if you pre-order any of the “special” editions of College Football 26 (or get the Madden/CFB bundle), you can start playing College Football 26 in the afternoon on July 7. Last year, it went live around mid-day EST, and so I’ll assume that’s when it will launch again since EA now tries to do global early access launches (so no New Zealand trick needed anymore).

I would guess next week’s newsletter will be wholly dedicated to my takes on College Football 26, but I want to remind folks that they can get an early jump on scouting out some parts of the game if they want. While I wouldn’t guarantee all the info is 100 percent official since I think these sites scraped the beta/leaks for the info, it seems like the info is likely more good than not.

Starting over at TeamCrafters, you can see the player ratings and rosters for every team in the game. EA released the top 100 players in CFB 26, and the overalls at least seem to mostly align with what’s on the TC site. It’s hard to know how accurate the rosters themselves are since the real college season doesn’t start for a bit, but some folks will certainly be able to figure out if any “major” players are missing based on the information found there.

If you want to see the playbooks, then you want to head over to CollegeFootball.gg. I will personally not be doing early scouting on the playbooks because I want to be surprised by all the new formations and looks, but you don’t have to follow that rule — go ham if you want to.

Finally, EA is doing a big push over the holiday weekend by featuring various EA-approved content creators showcasing CFB 26, and you’ll see their work all over YouTube before July 7.

Thanks To All Of You For Reading

Finally, I just want to thank you all once again for continuing to read and subscribe. This is one of the first “full circle” moments for me as this newsletter was launched on July 12 last year, so we’re coming up on our first full year, and College Football 25’s launch was one of the driving forces behind starting this newsletter in the first place, so it feels good to have made it all the way back around. I hope to keep doing this for a long time, so here’s to sticking around at least until College Basketball’s return.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase