College Football 26 Deep Dive Arrives Today, Let's Play the Guessing Game

It’s certainly been an odd pre-release schedule for the two major EA football games. CFB 26 comes out in under a month, and yet Madden 26 for whatever reason has been given the lead on the marketing front. My theory is that because CFB had such a strong year from a critical and sales standpoint, EA marketing probably felt it wasn’t a bad idea to let Madden get some free positive press coming out of a very strong Gameplay Deep Dive and trailer. After all, CFB and Madden are always going to share a lot of gameplay improvements, so the first to get to the trough will be fattest and happiest in terms of positive press.

But since that Madden deep dive released earlier this week, I don’t think it would be a good use of this newsletter to simply breakdown the 30+ pages of info — as much as I love doing that. It would also be a poor use of time because we know College Football 26 is doing their own deep dive today, so it would feel a bit weird to discuss the “old news” when the new hotness is hours away.

We’re back with a new OS survey I would love for you folks to fill out if you have a moment. This is an important one for me personally because as I’ve said before this newsletter is now the thing I love working on the most at OS. I pour a lot into it, and that’s easy to do because I’m passionate about it and want to honor the time you take to read it every week. This survey is not only about the current newsletter, it also relates to a premium newsletter option that would be in addition to this one.

I think newsletters, forums, and Discord are a much better way than general “social media” to build a group that grows and lasts. I believe having some “barrier to entry” (and some quality moderation) is a good thing for a community’s welfare so not just anyone can come up and piss in the pool. I want folks to join in and enjoy their time both interacting with me and others in the OS community when it comes to this newsletter and beyond — and I want them to feel like their feedback is actually being heard. This is why we create these surveys, so please scope it out when you can spare a moment. Cheers, and now let’s get back to talking CFB and Madden.

Instead, I think a good use of the newsletter this week is discussing that Madden deep dive in the context of the CFB deep dive we’re getting within the hour. After all, it’s likely the trailer I embed below (and the Gridiron Notes) will be live by the time you read this.

Now, I don’t know what’s going to be in that trailer or the deep dive, but I may or may not have played the College Football 26 beta. I would never talk about that beta and break those rules, but hypothetically if I did talk about some college football game I played in a dream, I might be able to provide some context about what’s to come.

With that in mind, let’s talk about the Madden 26 deep dive and what it may or may not mean for College Football 26.

Speed…Kills

I talked about this for a stretch in a recent newsletter, but even before EA confirmed it with this deep dive, it was clear College Football 25’s gameplay speed had won the war. It definitively beat out the slower Madden in terms of positive fan feedback, and CFB’s pace felt like EA’s response to some people’s frustration with the overall slowness of Madden in the years since the current-gen cycle began in 2020. Like it or not, EA was pretty clear in that deep dive that both games will be on the same engine from a “speed” standpoint, and CFB’s style has won the day.

It’s very obvious in the gameplay trailer that Madden has gotten this speed boost:

I think it’s best showcased with this quick Kyler shot:

There’s a lot going on here because it’s not just the increased speed it’s the confirmation that we can once again make moves behind the LOS with the QB — a huge win in my book even before getting to the speed.

But really, look at Kyler moving. I think it’s an accurate representation of Kyler, but that sort of giddy up has been missing in Madden. It’s always been funny to me that CFB is usually faster than Madden when obviously the athletes in the NFL are going to be more high end than the athletes in CFB, but it seems that will no longer be the case.

However, what I think is odd is that in my dream, CFB doesn’t feel as fast to me as it did last year. It could be that it feels slower in my hands versus when I’m just watching, but the way Kyler pops in that clip is a little different from my experience in the dream where I played a mystical college football game.

None of this concerns me too much one way or another for now — beyond thinking it’s a good idea the games will share similar speed — but while some of you may disagree, I do hope the gameplay leans more towards that Kyler clip in terms of speed.

Madden Finally Taking “Signature Style” Seriously, Where Does That Leave CFB?

QBs obviously took center stage in the Madden deep dive, and I do think this year’s equivalent of last year’s pre-snap twitching/player movement that was in Madden but won’t be in CFB is the signature animations/throw styles in Madden that won’t make it to CFB. And what I mean by that is “signature style” is the thing CFB fans will most be wishing made it to their game because of how much flavor it adds to the experience.

But unlike the pre-play idle animations from last year, it feels correct that “signature style” isn’t making it to College Football because, well, college football isn’t based on pro teams where a handful of the QBs are household names for years on end.

Still, is there a middle ground that CFB could attack? I think there is, but first can we talk about this Penix throw from the trailer:

Holy shitballs that gets out fast. I’m actually not sure if I’m a fan of that or not — none of the other throws in the trailer stood out like that in terms of the speed so maybe it’s just a one-off thing — but does that feel realistic? I truly don’t know, but I do think that’s faster than any throw I usually see in a football game and had to mention it here.

Anyway, the thing that got me the most excited with this “signature style” was obviously the arm slots and signature throwing styles. The fact that Stafford will be able to switch between arm slots depending on the throw he needs to make is super cool (he’s also the one guy I would expect to get a ball out as fast as Penix did in that GIF above). EA can do this in Madden because we know this is how Stafford plays. EA can’t do this in CFB because we don’t have the same sort of years of information and scouting on hundreds and hundreds of college QBs.

But they can still do unique arm slots in CFB:

And this is the sort of flavor I do expect to see in CFB. Even if we’re talking about players more in terms of archetypes rather than wholly unique individuals in the college game, there’s no reason you couldn’t have this same system for what slot the QBs throw from also tied to any QB in college.

The same goes for the traits being “introduced” in Madden. EA listed 50 of them, and I’m not going to list them all here — some of them we already had in some form or another in prior games anyway. But I think it’s important to reiterate these are not meant to make players better/worse, it’s to try and make AI players do things that are either unique to them or make them feel different from other AI-controlled players.

This is a worthy goal to have, so saying I’m underwhelmed by these traits wouldn’t be a fair characterization of my feelings, but what I will say on this “traits” stuff is this isn’t the first time EA has gone down this path. They can do marketing buzzwords and say XYZ is now powered by whatever tech, but I’ll tell you I don’t care how many years of data is being feed into “AI machine learning” or whatever — none of that stuff really matters. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that it comes down to “priority” balancing.

I think a lot of people would be shocked by how many animations or gameplay hooks are already in Madden, and they’d be shocked because they never see a lot of them. It’s great to add thousands of new animations, but if we only see 10 of them, then who cares? It’s like if I added 5,000 new pieces of dialogue but you only heard the commentators saying a handful of them, then what does it matter how many things you technically added?

It’s the same reason I think it’s great that new coach DNA is being added, but really the biggest thing mentioned was that EA is taking the Real-Time Coaching system from CFB. That’s the real note because the AI playcalling in Madden was bad last year (and the years before that)! It wasn’t perfect in CFB, but it was absolutely better than in Madden.

Madden had issues with teams not running enough, and the playbooks still fell into these obvious buckets so most AI teams played the same even if the playbooks weren’t exactly the same. The same goes for why most teams ran the same stuff on third and long and so on. I’m not going to simplify everything down to being a “prioritization” issue, but clearly Madden struggles to diversify and use the entire playbook just like it struggles to make the AI at most positions feel and play different.

CFB doesn’t have this same issue to try and fix, but a “robo QB” is a universal concept, and this traits stuff is the sort of thing that I would hope changes the dynamics of how QBs play overall — because that is the point of this particular traits system. Some 60 OVR Eastern Michigan QB should not be dotting us up to the tune of 80+ percent accuracy, but I would say whether a guy was a 60 OVR or a 95 OVR, they felt like similar challenges much of the time in CFB 25. Now, QBs were way less accurate overall in this fabled college game I played in my dream, and while I liked that, this isn’t just a question of accuracy. A “bad QB” should maybe have certain traits like paranoid/quick trigger/panic button and thus feel demonstrably different than the 90 OVR guys beyond just making a worse throw here and there. They should read the field differently, not trust themselves to make certain throws a lot of the time, and so on. This should be the target with traits for CFB and that’s how you continue to make AI players feel different as we go between not just styles of QB but talent levels of QB.

Monotony Is Death, EA Is Finally Learning This (Hopefully)

I will always say the best franchise/dynasty mode in sports games should be football games. It has shorter seasons, lots of roster turnover, plenty of ways to win, and it’s easy to get through more seasons than in any other sport. The problem is that even with all of football’s built-in advantages as a video game franchise mode, “comfort” can’t give way to monotony, and Madden is monotonous — boring. People talk about bugs and lack of depth to Madden’s franchise mode, and that’s fair, but I still always blame the gameplay first in Madden.

A lot goes into gameplay and how it can stave off boredom, but I would start with the visual stuff first. We already talked about signature animations, and that’s a huge one. Weather is another big factor, and EA is taking this seriously in both games as well:

By the way, clearly the meta for snow games should be rocking the all-white uniforms and just blending in because, man, look at that picture. Even if you make the right reads, good luck if you’re going against a team in whites. I love it, to be clear, but get you a team in Madden that has an all-white uniform combo to blend in and dominate in your online franchise. In short, on the visuals/animation front, I think EA is going to do a better job trying to make every week feel unique now.

Playcalling is another one that is obvious. I already mentioned how much it sucks that you know most teams are going to play the same way, and the same goes for knowing XYZ play is going to work every week no matter the opponent. Real-time coaching exists to hopefully try and help with this on both fronts, but Madden is also talking about dynamic play suggestions, which was not a main part of RTC last year.

I am of two minds on this one. This is a good addition overall as a teaching tool and also to add to that variety, but I think we should remind ourselves this is probably only true for going against the AI. When playing against a human who is good, “stock” plays aren’t generally the way to stop stuff. We have enough tools at our disposal now that I think it’s correct for EA to no longer do the thing where they just “nerf” your play even if the other team doesn’t adjust, but picking the “right” play isn’t really how you find the answers either. You have to go at least one layer beyond that by coming up with a user blitz that gets pressure fast enough, or you change the depth of a specific zone, etc. I’m not expecting Madden to do that sort of thing for me, but it’s just a general note that correct playcalls don’t win you the game against most somewhat skilled users.

How To Differentiate Gameplay

As for the gameplay itself, when I play a football game, I’m looking to get those sweet dopamine hits a couple different ways, and I think Madden fails these tests a lot of the time. On offense, number one with a bullet is I want to juke defenders (hopefully more with left-stick moves than right stick moves) and make plays in the open field. In Madden (and even CFB to some extent), the goal is more to trigger a “juke out” animation, which is then just a canned two-man animation rather than an organic moment — that’s repetitive and not nearly as fun or dynamic.

On defense, I want to make good reads as a linebacker and not get screwed by dropping easy picks. This one is more of a hot topic because some people think there are too many picks and others want defenders to drop balls rather than pick off any pass they get two hands on. I don’t want defenders to drop balls that hit them in the hands (at least not usually), but I think EA said the right stuff in terms of how they’d at least like to approach secondary play.

Now, take a drink because every year we hear about “psychic” DBs being fixed in some form in the lead up to a new EA football game, but I do think this is the correct balance to try and seek. We shouldn’t drop passes in the secondary very often, but we also shouldn’t see defenders snapping their head around at the last second and making a pick. Instead, I would not give the user an option to pick the ball off in this situation. I would go as far as to just build something in that if a defender doesn’t get his head around to look at the ball before attempting a pick that pressing the INT button just triggers a swat rather than an INT animation.

No matter what EA decides to do, I don’t think the trailer does the best job selling the goal of removing psychic DB play. While the new swats look good, I think it’s still showing off some “psychic” tendencies in terms of how DBs are attacking the ball.

Even so, that’s not really concerning for me in either game. Psychic DBs haven’t been this overwhelming force for a long time to me, it’s more zone vs. man that has taken over as what impacts the “meta” more year-to-year than a DB making a psychic read.

What is concerning to me is man coverage and leverage.

In their trailer showing off auto-motion and playbook expansion, they put, if not a bug, then an obvious shortcoming of last year’s game that still seems to be in this year’s game. Watch the Packers defender tracking the auto-motioning player coming out of the backfield and see how he pauses for a moment rather than continuing to track his assignment.

EA says “leverage” 20 times in their deep dive (I checked!), and yes, leverage is super important in football. You know what the above shows? I severe lack of care about leverage. The only thing that saves this from not being a TD is a bad RAC animation, and this was one of the main issues with auto-motion in last year’s game. A reason auto-motion is so powerful is because defenders freeze during pre-snap, and users can’t override that and get that guy out to the hashes. That Packers defender is out-leveraged by a good five yards — user input is irrelevant as you get frozen like the AI as well — and that shouldn’t be how this pre-snap situation plays out.

But as much as that one thing concerns me with auto-motion, in my dream where I play the latest football game, I was shocked by how strong man coverage was overall. It feels like stock man coverage is very powerful, and while EA can tune this, it does go back to the points about leverage. I love that EA is saying if you play inside/outside, that means less will be there if the receiver tries to get to those spots — that’s football. They even have a “route commit” feature now that goes a step beyond just guessing pass or shading, and I think that’s really cool/smart.

All that said, it didn’t feel like leverage was truly the major factor here, it more just felt like bumping receivers at the line and man defense could take away most routes, regardless of leverage. I’m wondering if the “meta” with route commit might just be leveraging the sidelines on outside receivers and then usering an LB while have one/two zones play up the middle. I hope it’s not that easy to take away most route combos, but we are certainly going to be entering a new era with some of the new tools being provided — even before getting to the awesome sauce they’re adding for how certain zones work now.

Church And State

Another thing I’m not concerned about but do wonder how EA is going to handle is the online vs. offline feedback. I’m not worried EA is going to do XYZ to please the online audience, but I’m wondering if EA has all the “safeguards” in place to make sure the experiences can be wholly different if need be.

I can tell you right now, I don’t think a lot of online people are going to want insane weather, wear & tear, home field advantage, or something like the psychic QB Field General ability to be in online games. I wouldn’t really blame them either for not wanting most of those things. I want them for my dynasty mode, but do I want every away game in CFB to be a nightmare in a non-dynasty environment? Probably not.

“Competitive” gaming in sports is a weird mix of personal preferences, but if it’s about seeing who the “best” player is, it’s not hard to make the case for why not being able to see your passing icons simply because you’re on the road is rather unfair and unbalanced. And, again, in an online dynasty all that stuff should be there, I’m more talking for Ultimate Team or standard H2H games.

Hell, I would say this stuff even extends to franchise/dynasty mode. I like how you can’t choose how you progress players in CFB 25, but from my dreams, I expect we might get a manual way to progress our players this year. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good idea or how I want to play dynasty mode, but I’m not unhappy it’s an option either.

EA is giving franchise heads and offline gamers a lot of treats this year, and that’s long overdue and the right way to go about things to try and win over some long-time fans, but they do need to maybe consider expanding the idea of arcade/sim/competitive game settings to stuff like weather or how extreme wear and tear actually works in a “comp” environment.

(On the topic of wear and tear, comp players might want that around a bit more than the others because in my dream the hurry-up is still insanely effective and finding ways to slow offenses down through fatigue or wear and tear does seem like a fair way to try and balance that out — otherwise I don’t know why everyone wouldn’t just run hurry-up all game.)

We Have No Shot Of Using All These New Defensive Tools

On the topic of balance, a lot of the new defensive tools we’re getting are rad — I expect CFB to say they’re getting essentially all the same defensive tools listed in the Madden deep dive — but both games are going to need to have a moment where they accept there’s no f*cking way we can use all these tools pre-snap.

It’s a problem that doesn’t have one obvious solution to me because, as I’ve mentioned, it’s much easier to make 2-3 quick hot route changes that bust a coverage vs. the many inputs you have to do to counter them. This is due to the controls themselves, but also because we have to click on each defender and make specific changes that way as well. Point being, it’s really cool that custom defensive zones are a thing, but there’s no way in those five seconds before you get quick snapped that you’re going to do a custom defensive zone and get much else done from there.

EA needs to decide pre-snap is “forced” to last X number of seconds so the defense has a chance to make adjustments at the LOS, or they’re going to have to investigate ways in the future for us to plan more pre-snap tweaks before we even break huddle from the playcall screen — and this of course ignores the chaos of hurry-up situations, which is a whole other beast.

Balancing Offensive And Defensive Line Has To Suck

Not to end this on a down note because I’m overall very excited for both football games at this point, but I have to talk about offensive and defensive line play because it’s always a hot topic. With that in mind, let me just say, I would not want to have the job of balancing offensive vs. defensive line.

Madden is adding some cool stuff with “steering” (and leverage!) — again, expect this in CFB — and is even baking in unique pass protections to the plays now, which is long overdue. However, the problem with offensive line play is that outcomes are binary. There aren’t a lot of “half wins” or “half losses” with this stuff, and so balancing is a nightmare because most of the time it still comes down to: did the defender shed a blocker or not?

Psychic DBs get all the attention, but offensive linemen are psychic as well in these games. You might not think it because you see blown assignments sometimes, but most of the time, it’s an animation issue/bug where some O-line player just didn’t engage when they were trying to or something like that. You don’t “fool” offensive lines in these games with simulated pressures — even though you should. Any “stock” play does not fool the offensive line, and so the only wins are either sheds or just simply sending more guys than can be blocked.

This is why nano blitzes are even a thing in the first place. Nanos are formed various ways, but one of the ways is by putting a guy in a specific gap before the snap and tricking the offensive lineman into targeting you rather than another player. It’s the “video game version” of a simulated pressure in a sense.

As an aside, this is also why the “unTarget” system being added is one of the smarter gameplay ideas I’ve seen in any sports game in years:

It’s honestly a brilliant idea, and while I suppose new issues could arise from the player you’re ignoring rushing the QB, that’s at least a cat-and-mouse game that’s part of the risk-reward guessing game rather than the old days where you had no way to stop a nano unless EA patched it out.

But returning to the topic of balancing, I’m worried about how dominant the run game felt in my dreams and yet how unsatisfying it felt at the same time. We’re seeing all this speed and open-field hotness in Madden, but I’m worried it won’t feel very rewarding because it’s not earned. Ignoring the fact that I think open-field/downfield blocking is going to suck in these games for the 10000th year in a row, right now it feels like the run game is overpowered because your offensive line “just wins” on a consistent basis.

In part, that’s probably bad gap reads/pursuit angles by AI defenders (which is concerning in its own right!) more than a lack of the new leverage/steering not working, but my point is what’s the fix? The blocking systems in these games need to become much more granular even if you remove all the “cheats” or “psychic” players because it’s still essentially a binary system. When you’re balancing a binary system for something like an offensive/defensive line interaction, it makes all the traits/abilities/attributes irrelevant because it’s all just leading to a coin flip “shed or no shed” moment.

This doesn’t mean you can’t find a solid balance and still have a good time playing along the defensive line, but it’s also why most years we only remember whether it was easy or hard to run the ball (or whether pass protection was good or bad) and not why it was easy or hard to run the ball. “My guys blocked or they didn’t” is usually the only why you need, and that’s not good enough anymore, and it’s going to hinder the payoffs of a sick juke or reading the right hole when the hole is always a mile wide or it’s just never there with no in between — thus eliminating the skill gap or reason to have elite vision between the tackles.

Anyway, it’s nearly showtime, so I hope you all enjoy the trailer that releases today and we get tons of good stuff out of the 40+ pages that are likely coming in today’s deep dive. I’ll be there along with you reading and reacting, and we’ll see where we stand by next week.

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

-Chase

Are you sold on Madden or CFB 26 or still one the fence? I give you the means to hit me up with comments, thoughts, musings, questions, or anything else on this topic and beyond. 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.