With Football Manager 25 having already committed the cardinal sports game sin of reaching the year in the title without release, and now has let another month slip by without news, sim gamers may find themselves wondering what is left to fill the void. If football of another flavor tickles your fancy, the simple but engaging gameplay of Football Coach: College Dynasty may be just what you’re looking for.
What I Like
A Simple Balance
As noted above, Football Coach: College Dynasty is far from the most complex sports simulation on the market. Instead, it serves a valuable role as either a point of entry for gamers new to the genre, or a more relaxing option for seasoned sports sim gamers who also enjoy a bit of a break from scouring spreadsheets. The tactical and recruiting decisions you make as a coach every week are broken down handily in a weekly dashboard making it easy to track everything you have to do and comes with a reminder to check you did it all before advancing to the weekend.
In the offseason, this means taking recruiting actions, offering camp visits, and applying your coaches’ training abilities to help players boost their attributes. Once you reach game weeks, training comes off the table and your weekly prep replaces it, such as setting your depth chart, managing practices, and establishing a gameplan in its place.
In each of these sectors, the actions within are clear and become second nature sooner than later. By the time I was hitting my first set of conference games, I already felt more than comfortable making recruiting decisions and scouting my opponent to draw up a winning strategy. The learning curve is very gentle. With a little trial and error, I was able to right the ship of a team that started among the worst in the worst conference, and turn them into a bowl team by season two and a side that finished just one first down shy of a conference championship and a place in the national playoff in season three.
Team Customization
Speaking of the team I took over, the game has a simple customization option for your own side and that of your rival. The details on offer aren’t overly complex — a pair of team colors, name information and some basic details about the school — but it’s a fun way to make it feel like your own, particularly if your side is one of the schools that is not quite as openly apparent in their legally distinct forms. I gave my podunk DIII school and our rivals a DI glow-up and soon found myself more invested in a fake TCNJ-Rowan rivalry than I ever was for the real one.
A personal favorite of this customization is the use of a zipcode for the school. While providing your team or college’s location is fairly standard among sports games with team creation, often this is a cosmetic choice, simply assigning some text to a label. With Football Coach: College Dynasty the zipcode is translated to reality with proximity to school being one of the various decision-making factors that may or may not be important to a recruit. It was a nice touch seeing players from towns truly local to Ewing, NJ behaving as such.
The Recruitment Chase
Like any simulation game, team building is where the real magic happens in Football Coach: College Dynasty, and for a college sports game that means recruiting. If you’re a fan of the relaunched EA College Football, and if you’re a college football fan it’s statistically likely that you are, you may already be familiar with the recruiting system on offer.
At any time you can maintain a list of up to 40 recruits who you devote your attention to each week in the hope of wooing them to your side. This can occur at the most basic level by keeping them targeted, because sometimes it just feels nice to be noticed, or feature harder sells like camp or school visits to dazzle players, while also getting a better feel for their ability and potential should you sign them.
The coaches on your team, including both coordinators, can also help greatly in your pursuit of future stars. Each coach delivers weekly recruiting actions based on their recruiting rating allowing you to carry out more actions of higher levels the better-rated your coach is.
Finally, the hammer of Name Image & Likeness rights allows you to spend your school’s NIL budget to sweeten the pot and lock down the most challenging and highest-profile signings.
All of this plays out with a simple display of the current recruitment status, including the top five schools on a player’s list and their relative place in the pursuit, with total recruiting points slightly masked should you choose a more challenging approach. This all culminates in signing ceremonies which teasingly show you every team’s chances of winning the signature before showing the player’s commitment. Every major signing you’ve poured a season of investment into becomes nail-biting fun when they prepare to put pen to paper.
Meaningful Decision Making
The biggest worry anytime you’re dealing with a simple simulation system is that it will be so simple as to be ineffectual. Fortunately, after playing tens of hours across multiple seasons, Football Coach: College Dynasty is a game where you can see the impact of your decisions, good or bad.
When I did a deep dive on a conference rival’s stats and roster to tweak my gameplan just right then saw it all come together for a double-digit upset and our first win over a ranked opponent, let alone one in the top ten, I was elated. When a big game saw me trying a desperation Hail Mary, in field goal range but down four instead of three when an aggressive 2-pt strategy backfired, I was gutted over the decision minutes prior that I struggled with mightily before choosing the ill-fated 2-pt attempt.
Season-on-season I felt like I had a better grip of the core mechanics of these simple systems, and season-on-season my team’s performances went up in lock-step.
What I Didn’t Like
Tiny Tykes Graphics
This is less my own personal grumbling so much as an acknowledgment that others’ mileage may vary. The character pictures in Football Coach: College Dynasty all use the same simple template system with a few categories of styling randomized in order to generate player and coach looks. For my own tastes, I found the little icons to be charming, even if they did have the tendency to make many of the high school recruits in the game look like they’re between 35 and 65 years old.
For other gamers, the childish look may be a bit off-putting. This goes hand-in-hand with the overall presentation of Football Coach: College Dynasty, which could charitably be described as minimalist. Sports sims aren’t generally known for their stunning visuals, but the game does little to break away from that stereotype, with the majority of play outside of gameday taking place on similar-looking pages of tables, buttons, and blocks of text.
Challenging Navigation
Another area that seasoned sims gamers may not be surprised to see Football Coach: College Dynasty struggle in is navigation. Creating an easy and intuitive way to flow between a series of databases in whatever pathways a gamer may consider is a challenging ask, and post-release skins are popular with communities in games like Football Manager because creating one way that works for everyone is simply not a realistic goal.
Instead, the aim for a sim’s user interface is broad accessibility to any player to make playing the game — and understanding actions — as simple as possible. On the one hand, the tutorial system in your first season does an excellent job of explaining all the game’s key concepts enough to get started. On the other hand, getting around them can often be a nightmare.
For starters, pathing from the page you’re on to the one you want to check out is often a bit laborious, with more steps than feels necessary for nearly any navigation away from the week’s default action pages.
In particular, the way settings on your recruiting sections reset when leaving is endlessly frustrating. Anytime I felt like I needed to leave the targets or recruiting pages for more information, like checking out my depth chart at a position to consider a recruit’s potential place in it, I would come back needing to redo all the filters and selections. When I was simply browsing by recruit priority, this was fine. When I was conducting a recruit search to identify targets who met multiple qualifications, each with their own series of checkboxes or dropdown selections, it was anything but.
Questionable AI Decision Making
I’m no tactical genius on the football field. I enjoy a J.T. O’Sullivan QB breakdown or Brett Kollman explaining why a play or scheme works as much as the next person, but I never played football beyond pickup or had a consistent diet of tape at any time in my life. I played the game with a head coach approach, letting my coordinators call plays with the exception of occasionally overruling them in big situations. As an X’s-and-O’s casual, I generally liked what my coordinators were doing.
The problem comes in the times I didn’t, and the way AI opponents don’t have a human at the wheel to correct when those bad ideas pop up. The biggest issue I ran into on more than one occasion was clock management decisions that would make you wonder if Matt Eberflus had fallen down to the college ranks in your imaginary world.
More than once, my team suggested punting in a situation which would have definitively killed off any chances in the game. On the occasions this happened for computer teams, they just went ahead and did it. Now, mismanaging a few games a year where a 2%-chance of a win gets forfeited isn’t the worst sin, but it is indicative of a play calling AI that is not quite as dialed in as it could be.
The Bottom Line
I think the best review I can give to Football Coach: College Dynasty is to note just how much it made me care. While the game may not be overloaded with the bells and whistles of immersion like College Football 25, or the crunchy decision making of more complex sims, none of that mattered as I sent my boys out and watched their bar move up and down the field.
When my first season’s bowl eligibility died at the hands of my rival, and my conference championship bid fell short the following year, I was devastated. When I marched my undefeated, 8th-ranked team out in year three ready to unleash the No. 1 offense in the country, I relished the thought of the cathartic beating I had in store for them.
I complained more about my imaginary players in this game than I did watching my Vols capitulate their season away in the real life playoff. And now that this review is done and I no longer have to play more Football Coach: College Dynasty to give it its fair due, I can’t wait to be off the clock so I can take my latest, best iteration into Rowan and deal them their delayed but inevitable fate.
Published: Feb 6, 2025 10:40 am