The 2025-26 Sports Game Simulation Awards

The Madden and CFB leaks are everywhere, but since we know EA has an event set for Thursday to unveil both games, I’m going to hold off on talking about everything that is unofficially official for now.

Instead, I want to look back at the year that was for the current sports games and how their simulation engines matched up to real life. I’m also going to be handing out some awards and demerits along the way to make it a little more spicy.

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For a little look behind the curtain, when you’re writing two newsletters a week and want to keep doing this for as long as they keep letting you do it, you want to be able to put some “evergreen” stuff on the calendar that slots into the yearly newsletter schedule so you have some stuff to fall back on here and there. The “simulation awards” are something I hope becomes a part of mine for this newsletter.

The start of summer feels like a good spot for these awards because outside of The Show, every other “major” sports game is about to gear up for its pre-release hype. Plus, we’re either through every real sports season or in the playoffs for every major sport that I’m going to talk about here (with the exception of baseball, of course).

The games I’m going to cover for the awards are NHL 26, The Show 26, Madden 26, CFB 26, and NBA 2K26. The World Cup is coming up so maybe I should include FC 26, but I’m always upfront about what I think I’m an “expert” on and not an expert on. With that in mind, soccer/EA FC, racing games, and UFC are definitely the sports where I’m a layman with both the real sport and associated video games these days, so I’ll avoid them for these awards because they’re about knowing enough about both the real sport and video game.

As for the format, I’m not going to go line by line and point out what’s good or bad about the simulation engine in each game, but I will give some high-level thoughts on the five games before giving out some awards — and maybe these will be things we can be reminded to look at when the new games come out in the months ahead.

I’m going to go in the order they came out in, so I’ll start with CFB and end with The Show. I’m also judging things based on default settings and rosters, and we’re just doing one season — all these games fall apart a bit as you push years and years into the future because the ratings start to fluctuate more and more, which has been an issue in essentially every sports game forever.

Also, I’m not going to go into trade engines or other stuff beyond the stats because I want to keep this somewhat manageable as a compare-contrast to the real sport.

College Football 26

Most people had beef with the non-stats stuff more than the stats stuff with CFB, which means the insanity of the transfer portal and the disparity that would quickly emerge between the good and bad teams as years went on (in part due to the portal).

However, beyond that stuff, the stats were hit-or-miss as well. You end up running more plays than the other teams if you play on 15-minute quarters (even with runoffs), so that’s a big issue right away between your team and everyone else’s.

But as for the raw stats themselves, CFB has a clear pass-run imbalance. The engine is simultaneously not able to handle the amount of pass attempts that some QBs throw while being too bullish about how capable they are as passers.

You’ll see too much of what Mestemaker is doing (53-3 TD to INT ratio!) with hyper efficiency because offense is inflated a bit, which leads to receivers having similarly somewhat inflated totals. Rushing stats aren’t nearly as bad, but they don’t mix in enough backups so you’ll see somewhat high rush attempts for stars.

On defense, you’ll see some silliness at the high end (Bain with 38 TFLs) but it’s not really that outlandish outside of the outliers. The turnover totals are reasonable, and mostly it just follows the same imbalance of a little too much passing and not enough rushing. And that’s reflected with team stats where pass yards per game are a little high and rush yards per game are a little low, going back to efficiency and ratios.

But probably the biggest issue comes into play with special teams. There are just not enough return touchdowns of any variety in the game. There is not enough “chaos” overall with special teams and defensive touchdowns, which I believe has been an issue with the EA football sim engine for years.

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