College Football 26 Dynasty Mode Analysis and Breakdown

Dynasty mode continues to be the flagship game mode for EA Sport's College Football 26, and for good reason.

Kyler Wolff

Published: Jul 24, 2025 01:30 pm

It’s the sophomore season of EA Sports College Football, and the next chapter of its flagship Dynasty mode that comes with it. We covered just how impressive and in-depth the game mode (a continuation of the fan-favorite mode from the NCAA series) was last year when EA first released Dynasty mode. Now that the mode has been updated and reconfigured for EA Sports College Football 26, I thought it would be interesting to do another breakdown detailing everything you need to know about this new version.

Build Your Coach

To start every Dynasty franchise, you’ll be able to customize a coach or pick from over 300 current active authentic coaches in the game, including coaches like Kirby Smart, Dabo Swinney, and Kalen DeBoer. The authentic coaches have the same playbook, recruiting style, and playcalling tendencies in the game as they do in real life. For players who enjoy recreating themselves as a college football coach, there are new customization options and gear for your coach to rock on the sidelines. A small but intriguing new dynamic has been added to the game: the coach’s demeanor and stance, allowing you to customize how your coach moves and is perceived on the sideline.

One of the bigger changes to the coaching section of the game mode is how your coach progresses. Coach levels will now increase to 100, up from 50 in the previous season. The progression also scales much more effectively now, making it harder to progress through the higher levels. It now takes upwards of an entire season to level up once you’ve reached level 50 or higher. Of course, it’s easier if you are consistently winning and putting up big stats.

Everything revolving around your coach and even beyond is meant to be symbiotic. Your success on the field gives you XP to level up your coach and get upgrades for your archetype. Your coach archetype is then what dictates how the rest of that symbiotic relationship takes place. The coach archetype takes on new importance this season as it has been greatly re-imagined. With 11 archetypes (three base: recruiter, motivator, and tactician; three elite: elite recruiter, master motivator, and scheme guru; three hybrid: talent developer, strategist, and architect; and two leadership: program builder and CEO) and new perks for each archetype, it’s a fun puzzle to figure out which archetype/perks will be the best fit for how you want to play the game.

The coach aspect of the game allows you to have a unique experience for each and every dynasty run you have. For instance, because of the new scaling prices for archetype unlocks (the first archetype you buy will be the cheapest, and they’ll get more expensive after each purchase), your experience will drastically change based on which archetype you pick. Unlike in previous years, you might actually be locked into one archetype (at least for your first few seasons) and thus have to play the game in one unique style. For instance, you might have to focus on developing players instead of just signing the top recruits year after year to build a contender.

A number of other improvements in this section include:

Notifications when your coordinators leave
A discount for archetypes that your coordinators own
A “staff moves” section with more info
New coordinator-centered perks in the program builder archetype
Adding a trophy room for all your achievements
And more!

Build Your Program

Outside of creating and upgrading your team through your coach perks and archetypes, there is also the actual matter of running your team. Whether it’s roster management, scheduling, deciding redshirts, or, most importantly, recruiting, there are tons of impactful changes made for this season’s iteration of the game.

The transfer portal has now become a significant part of the game, while last year and in years prior it seemed like more of an afterthought added as an auxiliary to the main recruiting section now (depending on your school) the transfer portal might be even a bigger asset in gaining talent than regular recruiting (there will now be roughly 2,000 transfer portal recruits per year in the game according to the developers, although did also add customization options so if you like the old school transfer system, you can crank down the transfer settings if you wish). While some people online may complain about how extreme it can get in the game, with top players always on the move, that is often the reality in real life. We live in the transfer portal era, and though EA may not fully acknowledge the NIL in dynasty mode, it is implied through “dealbreakers” for every player, which might be my favorite new change to the game.

I can see why the mechanic may be controversial; nobody wants to lose half their team because of a down year or a drop in conference prestige, but the challenge is what excites me. Trying to manage expectations from eighty different players on your roster, while also finding replacements in recruiting, can be a balancing act. I love being able to identify problems and find solutions. What I don’t love is that some of the dealbreakers don’t have solutions. I prefer the playing style or playing time dealbreakers I can do something about those things, what I can’t do anything about is dealbreakers like brand exposure or conference prestige, but alas, those are real issues challenging small “group of five” schools all across the country, and I’m the one always pushing for more realism in sports simulations so I guess I can deal with it. It’s just something they might want to address in next year’s iteration.

Another change they made to the dealbreaker mechanic was that the grade requirement changed depending on the player’s success instead of being a flat B- for all players regardless of their talent/success. Now, better players demand more, and lesser players demand less, which balances the game out very nicely.

A number of other improvements in this section include:

My team categories now have a steeper grade curve
The pro potential category now accounts for the last four seasons, not just the current roster
Costs of recruiting visits are now directly tied to the distance of your school from the recruit’s hometown and are much cheaper
Increased the number of recruits to 4,100 per season
Fewer top-end talent recruits, making it harder to land a stud
The UI now shows you the probability of success for sways
Player performance can now increase a player’s dev trait
Every player in the game now has season-long and career wear and tear pools that are depleted as they take on damage
And much more!

Delivering The World Of College Football

Dynasty mode is keeping pace with the ever-changing landscape of NCAAF by adding Missouri State and Delaware to the FBS, resulting in 136 playable teams in the game. EA has strived to create the most realistic and expansive simulation of college football ever created, and to do that, they needed to go backward.

EA has traced its history back to 1869 and has recorded and inputted all national championships since then, as well as all conference champions since 1896. This is part of the college football history section, now integrated into Dynasty mode. This section lists 14 awards, All-Americans, All-Conference players, and those who have achieved national and conference championships, dating back to the beginning. This section is where the history of your dynasty will be stored, and all your accomplishments will be in one place (along with the trophy room) for you to gaze upon.

The positions and archetypes in the game may also look a little different; you will now see edge rushers instead of defensive ends and Sam and Will linebackers instead of outside linebackers, as well as Mike replacing middle linebackers. There are also depth chart positions for long snapper, gadget player, and nose tackle. With regards to archetypes, there are now 59 unique archetypes in CFB 26.

A number of other improvements in this section include:

New statistical measurements like TD: INT ratio and fumble rate
Improved tiebreaker logic
You can set up to 50 formation subs
You can protect certain matchups for when you re-align conferences
New college football playoff formatting adjustments
Player stats are now more easily accessible on the player module
And much more!

My Final Analysis And Takeaway

My overall takeaway is that these updates to Dynasty mode are fantastic and improve on last year’s reimagining, which acted a lot like a 1.0 version of the mode. However, I wonder how long we will see annual updates, especially at this scale. According to game producer Chad Walker and designer Ben Haumiller, this version of the game mode was part of a multi-year vision that they started in EA College Football 25. They said, “… we had a multi-year vision for what we wanted Dynasty Mode to become, ” the pair said in a pre-release teaser for the game.

Despite their claim of a multi-year vision set before the release of College Football 25, the pair detailed how heavily involved fan input has been in adjusting the game mode for this year.

“We spent countless hours talking with community members, college football experts, and coaches. We also spent a ton of time watching Dynasty live streams, program rebuilds, wishlist videos, and of course reading thousands of message board posts and tweets.”

This resulted in a number of changes to the game mode that likely weren’t in the original plan, and shows just how deeply the developer team on this game cares about this mode.

I can’t help but compare it to EA’s other flagship football franchise, Madden, and its franchise mode, which has been in a form of perpetual stasis for nearly a decade. It’s hard to believe these two games are made by the same company. Take, for instance, the first game adjustment mentioned by the development team in their pre-release teaser.

“Last year, we saw players hitting the level cap too early — maxing out progression well before the later years of their Dynasty… In College Football 26, the maximum coach level has been increased from 50 to 100.”

That level of responsiveness from the development team, in seeing a problem and addressing it in the following iteration of the game, is something we don’t see from the Madden team. In fact, the last significant update to franchise mode that I can recall is the scouting update, which revitalized and retooled a one-dimensional scouting system into a more dynamic experience. That was about half a decade ago, and it is already stale, much like most of the rest of the game.

College Football’s freshness and newness (only the second year after a ten-year hiatus) could have driven this dev team to want to expand and improve on the game mode’s features. After all, Madden is over thirty at this point, and the team must feel that they’ve got nowhere else to go when it comes to updates or features, and that they’ve built the perfect game mode already, which, if you’ve ever played Madden Franchise mode, you would know how ridiculous that suggestion is. In reality, a “perfect” game mode doesn’t exist; it naturally becomes stale, no matter how well-designed the mode is. That’s why it’s so nice to see a game like EA Sports College Football 26 push mode forward while shaking things up. I hope this trend continues when the initial “multi-year vision” of the mode that the creators talked about expires.

I worry that the multi-year vision is a short-term road map leading to a final product in a few years. While that final product might be a great experience and could be terrific for the time being, it will eventually get stale. This game mode has incredible depth and breadth which makes it leaps and bounds better than Madden’s franchise mode as well as other similar modes in other titles, but without constant improvement and innovation it will go the way of Madden and become an annual joke on its own fans.