Madden's Franchise Mode Needs More 'College Football' Vibes

Even as someone who is not into New Year’s resolutions or introspective by nature, when December rolls around I still get introspective when it comes to my sports video games.

I want them to be as good as possible, and while I’m not self-aggrandizing enough to believe I have all the answers, I do think I mostly get what makes for a good franchise mode.

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However, I’m not about to write a Madden 27 wishlist today (I’ll probably do some wishlists in January), but rather I want to talk about Madden’s franchise mode and why I’m not playing it nearly as much as College Football 26’s dynasty mode right now.

Within that, I want to talk about where I think Madden’s franchise mode misses the mark in both specific ways (a couple obvious bugs/oversights) and some more general ways (what is my purpose here besides winning a Super Bowl?).

Then within those groups, I’ll of course provide some examples of what I might do instead to fix these problems.

I pick this topic because as I’ve said previously, I’m going back through and mainlining a lot of the major sports games this year for some awards I want to hand out before the end of the year.

It’s partly why I spent last week talking a lot about recruiting in CFB 26 — I was back playing the game a ton. This is Madden’s week in my schedule, but I found myself still returning to CFB over it because Madden’s franchise mode does not live up to CFB’s dynasty mode.

I actually think I like Madden’s base gameplay slightly more than CFB’s gameplay, but it doesn’t do enough with franchise mode to make me want to play multiple seasons, nor does it make me want to restart with new teams. It’s not that I think Madden’s franchise mode is terrible, it’s just not very interesting outside of a “first playthrough” or when you’re playing with a bunch of people in a solid online franchise.

The thing is, I actually don’t think it’s that far from being a solid mode, and I do think some of the stuff they did this year with coaching, loadouts, and making players feel more unique were all inspired to various degrees.

The problem arises when I ask myself, like some actors searching for what their character is about, “what’s my motivation here, guys?”

But before I get into that, I do want to share with everyone my current CFB dynasty mode settings and sliders. They’re a mixture of my own tweaking of a version of Matt10’s sliders, XP sliders mostly of my own making (at least I think they were from what I recall), and then the Transfer Portal findings of OSer Detroit Style. I have this all in a Google Doc that is free to look at.

I really only tested this stuff on All-American, so I have no comment on whether they work on anything else. I’ve also included the House Rules I use in my dynasties right now just in case you want to go extra crazy — you can find them in a separate tab of the doc.

Now, let’s get into Madden’s franchise mode, and why I think infusing it with some college mindset can help push it forward.

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