Junior year of college was when I finally had to start making decisions about my major, internships, all that jazz. A lot changed. I had to manage my time better, carefully consider the classes I would take, and try to plan for the future. For College Football’s junior year, all I have to do is step back onto the field, but there is still a lot of planning involved. This season’s team is playing better thanks to new offensive and defensive adjustments, giving you more freedom than ever to make a gameplan and bring it onto the field – but a lot of what’s new in College Football 27 comes down to menus and numbers and graphs, or what I call the Evil God of Numbers. It brings good, welcome additions. But man does it feel like I’m spending a lot of my season inside a spreadsheet instead of running a program or being a college athlete.

Before we get to all that stuff, let’s talk about practice. Good ol’ practice. Can’t have a game without practice, so the first place I went was the Skills Trainer. If you’ve played Madden, the Skills Trainer is old hat, but for the last couple years, College Football has sequestered this tutorial away inside of Ultimate Team. No longer. Here it is, standing alone in all its glory. Good teaching tools are essential in any game, and EA has figured out a consistently great version of them with the Skills Trainer, so I was stoked to finally see it right there on the main menu where it belongs. Props to the College Football team for listening to that feedback.

“But Will,” you might say, “you play this and Madden every year. Why are you going to the Skills Trainer? Shouldn’t you, like… know all this stuff already, chief?” I’m glad you asked, imaginary-person-I-made-up-so-I-can-structure-this-review-how-I-want. There are a lot of changes to pre-play adjustments this year, especially on defense, and they make for a bit of a learning curve when coming from College Football 26. If you’re already familiar with the Konami Code of inputs you have to learn to get your defensive adjustments just so, well, a lot of those are different now. D-line adjustments, for instance, used to be on the left D-pad. Now they’re left on the right stick. That’s one example of many. The benefit of this new system is it’s more intuitive and allows you to get what you want more quickly with fewer button presses, but that many years of muscle memory is hard to undo. I’m glad the Skills Trainer is here when I need a reminder, as well as to mention teach me new things like jumping the snap (awesome), wide receiver jostle (fantastic), and the new quarterback sneak meter (thank you, College Football team).

Another thing to learn is timing-based catching, which I’m of two minds about. See, when you throw a pass in College Football 27, and you can press down the button for the type of catch you want (Possession, RAC, Aggressive). That’s not new. What is new is that holding the button for the kind of catch you want now gives you a little meter with yellow, green, and red sections. Yellow means you’re attempting the catch early and the outcome will be based on your pass catcher’s catching stats and all the regular dice rolls these games use to determine what happens. Red means you ain’t catching that ball. Green, though, means you’re basically guaranteed a catch… unless you aren’t because the ball is overthrown or knocked away or your guy doesn’t survive the collision, which is incredibly annoying. Similar problems occur when you’re trying to use this system to make an interception, land that sucker in the middle of the green section and then… the ball sails over your head, right into the arms of the receiver.

The presentation, which was already best in class, is somehow better.“

Now, listen, I get it. A little minigame shouldn’t give you a guaranteed success/failure rate, but it doesn’t seem like you can turn the damn thing off. And, frankly, if I can hit the green and drop a pass, why can’t I hit the red and catch one if I’ve got a receiver with a high catch stat? Why would a defensive back who knows he can’t make a play on the ball (and would have a much better idea than I, who is looking down at the play) even get the meter? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it works. But when it doesn’t, you’re like “why is this even here?” Worse, it makes yet another part of College Football About Meters™, which is what you spend most of your time off the field staring at anyway.

Before we get into that, though, I do want to shower praise on a couple more on-field things. The presentation, which was already best in class, is somehow better. EA has added new traditions, trophies, stadiums – the whole nine yards. And Dynamic Weather, which can now change from play to play, is pretty remarkable (and can have a major influence on a game). All that of this is great, and it’s a testament to the team at EA Orlando that they have mostly solved the on-field gameplay and presentation while managing to add meaningful improvements each and every year. I just wish I was as jazzed about the other stuff.

All Hail John Block

Let’s start with Road to Glory. The big additions this year are three new positions: tight end, edge rusher, and free safety. Since I’d just spent a while learning the new defensive adjustments, I decided to throw all that in the trash and play tight end because EA has spent a lot of time talking up how fun blocking is. Sorry, Joe Throw. You’ll have to wait your turn this year. Instead, John Block takes the stage. I gave John a mohawk and Lemmy Kilmeister beard, then spent the points I had to establish his future maximum stats to make him both an incredible blocker (I mean, it’s in the name) and a solid receiver with some speed. If you don’t want to allocate all of these points, though (and there are a lot), you can choose from a preset build based on an NFL legend like Rob Gronkowski. From there, it was off to my high school career, and you know what? Playing a tight end is fun! Blocking a run and pancaking some poor DB is fun! Catching a game-winning pass is fun! But the old problems still raise their ugly head.

I started John Block as a three-star recruit – not bad, but not amazing, either – and worked him up to a five-star prospect who could have gone to basically any school he wanted. Alabama, LSU, and Michigan were my top picks, but I ended up going to Nebraska because they made a great offer and I’d be higher on the depth chart. High school is still my favorite part of Road to Glory, because each week gives you new challenges to complete and new things to do.

Then you get to college, and it’s mostly a spreadsheet. At a higher end school, I didn’t see the field much early, and my weeks quickly became about managing my limited energy on things like studying, conditioning, going to practice, and dealing with events, like getting invited to a party by a girl I went to high school with and blowing things so badly that she walked home alone… when we were in the same dorm. (Apparently, John Block’s high school highlights aren’t a big hit with the ladies. Some people just don’t appreciate greatness when they see it.) It’s a cool moment, but one that’s undercut by being delivered entirely through text and still images.

Admittedly, some of this is fun. I like the new practice drills, like the position-specific ones about blocking, and the team ones that put the offense down a score and task you with taking the lead within one minute while also leaving as little time on the clock as possible so the other team can’t score themselves. They’re a good time, and there’s a certain satisfaction in improving your player and moving up the depth chart. I really like that you can watch games on the sideline while you wait to play, too. It’s just a shame that everything else is a menu or a text conversation between JPEGs of characters you never share a physical space with.

Once you get past high school, Road to Glory is mostly a spreadsheet.“

It’s jarring to go from College Football’s incredible on-field presentation to Road to Glory’s barebones campaign. Yes, it’s great that you can track your player’s legacy and see where you’re likely to be drafted in real-time, but Road to Glory is supposed to be an RPG, and you spend most of it filling meters. Coach Happiness, Coach trust, where you stand on the depth chart, and so on. Off the field, it feels like you barely exist. Your player doesn’t really have a personality or friends or a life. He doesn’t inhabit a real world that isn’t a football field or football adjacent, and there’s more to being a college athlete (and college student) than text conversations and meter management. Until EA gives me something more, Road to Glory is something I typically play for these reviews and then move on from. I wish the rest of it was as fun as the high school experience is. John Block and Joe Throw remain almighty, but man living their lives is boring.

The core appeal of these games is and will always be Dynasty. There’s a lot of new stuff to manage this year, and at first it’s overwhelming. It’s not just about doing your recruiting, playing your games, and moving onto the next week anymore. The big changes here are Athletic Director Expectations, Dynasty Points, and how much you're offering that player for NIL (name, image, likeness) rights. AD Expectations are what you’re expected to do, and how patient (or not) your school will be while you do those things. Each school is different: some want national championships, while another may just want to cream their rival. You get Dynasty Points based on things like your conference prestige, stadium atmosphere, and so on, and then you have to spend them to hire staff, upgrade your facilities, offer the players you’re trying to recruit NIL deals, keep the ones on your team happy, and so on.

It’s… a lot, and I’m not sure I spent all my Dynasty Points wisely. Sometimes I’d try to buy some facility upgrades and College Football 27 would be like, “Are you sure? This is expensive and you only get so many points. Are you super duper sure?” On one hand, props to the dev team for realizing This Is A Lot. On the other… I had no idea if I wanted to spend my points here, man. I just kinda went off vibes and watched what happened. Thankfully, I was LSU and I was winning, so I had room to make mistakes. My complaint about Dynasty for the last couple years is that it’s mostly recruiting (which is just a bunch of menus that I find really boring) and playing games. This changes that by offering more stuff to manage (and a better coaching carousel at the end of each season, if you want to move on), and there is a strange joy to following your Dynasty blueprint, offering players scholarships, and landing the right recruits. I also love that I can manage my players’ individual practice status now.

One particular change I am fond of here is that offering a scholarship doesn’t just take a chunk of your limited recruitment hours per week. Now, you gotta spend Dynasty Points to offer them an NIL deal, too. Offering more than they expect may get their attention, but if you renege on it later, they’ll be unhappy. It’s an interesting system.

The problem is that it’s all just more menus to sit through while I look at some JPEGs. I’m sure being a college football coach is a lot of spreadsheet management, but College Football 27’s major off-field adds are all spreadsheets, and my reward for sifting through them is to actually play the fun football part. And… I get it. The Venn Diagram between highly invested sports fans and nerds is a circle, and a lot of them can spend hours just Listing Guys and Comparing Their Numbers and have a great time. But there’s more to this than filling meters and min-maxxing, which is essentially what most of Dynasty is. The Evil God of Numbers has laid claim to basically all of College Football’s off-the-field stuff, and it kinda makes me sad.

Now, I suppose, we have to talk about Ultimate Team. And… it’s Ultimate Team, man. You still do challenges and earn card packs and build your team and all that jazz. There’s a lot of new stuff around player upgrades this year that allow you more freedom when shaping your guys. An even bigger change called EVOs is supposed to be coming down the line, but it isn’t available quite yet. That said, none of this changes how I feel about Ultimate Team as a mode, so I’m going to let Past Will take this away with a direct quote from my College Football 26 review:

“I functionally believe, deep in my soul, that these modes are predatory, more than a little evil, and designed to trigger the dopamine-producing parts of our brain that gambling stimulates in the hopes that you will continue to spend money for a chance at a good outcome, which is what gambling is, and I cannot endorse anything about them. Yes, you can build a team without spending money, but it is designed to take much longer than just opening your wallet, and given that doing so can literally make your team better, it is pay to win. These are unremarkable and verifiable truths. Do with them what you will.”

Speaking of which, we should also talk about a little bugaboo that has hit Road to Glory and Dynasty: the removal of XP Sliders. It used to be that you could juice your coach and player progression to get levels faster. That has been removed, but you can buy coach and player levels for real money now. The nicest thing I can say is that this is a scumbag move that degrades what is otherwise a pretty good game, but hey, the Evil God of Numbers says the line’s gotta go up. Whether or not the sliders will be re-added at some point after release is anyone’s guess, but my money is on “lolno.”