Read our hands-on impressions for EA Sports College Football 27 here.
This is a big year for EA Sports College Football 27 (CFB 27). While the game will feature the largest defensive changes in both CFB and Madden that they have seen in recent years, the big highlight for CFB 27 is the massive overhaul that Dynasty players will experience. With new AD expectations to meet at the schools you coach at, such as the introduction of NIL and a revamp of the coaching carousel, we spoke with Production Director Christian McLeod about the upcoming changes.
McLeod dives deeper into NIL. facilities changes, defensive adjustments, the introduction of dynamic weather, and more.
BUT WHY THO: To start off with, this seems to be a big year for you all on CFB. You are doing the largest dynasty overhaul, and I guess the real question to start with is, why now?
Christian McLeod: Well, we had a three-year plan when we came back. So, 25 was all about getting the coach archetypes ready to go. 26 was about refining those, and we always knew that we wanted to have a staff management portion in it.
The kind of fly in the ointment, though, was NIL, and we were trying to figure out what was going to happen in the real world with NIL because we wanted to represent it as authentically as possible. So, thankfully, it’s settled a little bit. It’s not as much of the wild, wild west as it was a couple of years ago.
So this was the year when we felt it was time. Let’s bring in NIL, let’s bring in staff management, let’s bring in facility upgrades, put all of that on top of the coach archetypes, make that unsolvable puzzle happen, and you know, make it a ‘Go big year’ in Dynasty.
BUT WHY THO: What were some of the challenges in CFB 27? The team has come up with Dynasty Points now, but then we also have coaching points. What were some of the challenges in distinguishing the features from each other, and where do you all want to use these?
Christian McLeod: We wanted a really meaningful push-pull in everything that we were doing, because honestly, if we talk about unsolvable puzzles all the time, it’s really important that there are real big stakes in the game. If you invest somewhere, it’s going to take away from somewhere else, and that’s where we came up with the concept of dynasty points.
Dynasty points are that overarching currency that feeds your staff, that feeds your facilities, and that feeds your NIL. You, of course, still have your coach points, which are your coach progression and your archetypes, how you’re building that coach out. It’s almost like how your currency of how you’re getting paid.
But that was the big thing, we wanted to make sure that everything was tuned and balanced in such a way that whatever school that you took, there were these really meaningful push-pull mechanics, and especially with the athletic director expectations that we put in as well, we’re calling those the main wild card now, because you can have the budget all you want, but your athletic director is going to be asking you every single year, it’s dynamic, to do certain things, to beat your rivals, to get a certain win percentage, to potentially rebuild your facilities, right?
So, you could have a situation where you go to UTEP, for example, and UTEP starts winning four, five, six, or seven years into it, and all of a sudden, they want to upgrade facilities. That’s now a place where you have to budget those dynasty points, which may take away from your NIL or somewhere else if you’re not earning more of those dynasty points across the board. So that was one of the reasons, too, as we look at launching this and taking our time to launch it, because it is a very complex system. I want to make sure there’s a really meaningful push-pull.
BUT WHY THO: How did you all strike a balance for the recruiting process? Where you have interests, deal breakers, and you already have a portal, but now you’re injecting a whole other variable into recruiting [with NIL].
Christian McLeod: That was the main thing. We didn’t want to make it the bag. I’m just going to throw this bag at a player, and it’ll just be the instant win button, because that’s no fun even when you’re playing online dynasty. So that was a big one for us, as we looked at it to say we wanted NIL to matter as a scholarship bonus.
You still need to recruit, you still need to hit on the pitches, you still need to hit on making sure that recruit comes in. It’s a great visit. You’re trying to sway them away from other schools, but you’re sweetening that pot a little bit with the NIL, and honestly, based on who you are as a school, what your prestige level is, [and] the proximity to home, that’s going to change the expectations of NIL from these different schools.
So, your school grades now matter more than ever, because having good school grades and the things that those players care about will give you discounts on that NIL, so it is. I mean, it’s a pretty complex system that has to be balanced across the board, but that’s kind of the way that we looked at it, because we did not want a situation where, especially in online dynasty, whoever comes to the table with the most NIL gets the player who has the recruit.
BUT WHY THO: My school, the grades, they’ve been around for about 20-plus years, so why’d y’all decide to just keep going with that, versus, oh, we’re already overhauling everything? Let’s just go ahead and do this, too.
Christian McLeod: One of the main ones was that we never were able to make in the past: facilities matter. That was a big one you could never change, so we also want to put more emphasis on brand, and brand wasn’t just about winning.
So, when you look at facilities, for example, this was our first foray into doing what we always wanted to do for many years. When I was working on this in the past, [I wanted to] make facilities something that the user can invest in, upgrade, and it’s not just, hey, you keep winning, so therefore now you’re B plus or A plus, and so on. We love that system because it is something that, in real life, is a way to take a school and build it from scratch.
My buddies play a lot as Eastern Michigan, for example, and love Eastern Michigan, from Detroit, and the beauty of that is seeing them go from the C’s to the B’s to the A’s. It’s that meaningful progression across all those aspects that opens up many of the other pieces as well.
BUT WHY THO: In CFB 27, you upgrade the facilities now. Is this only going to be what you see from the interior of progression development? Are we going to see any changes, aesthetic-wise, for the stadium itself?
Christian McLeod: As of [CFB 27], you have nothing aesthetically. We work with the schools. We want to represent the schools as authentically as possible, and so we obviously don’t want to go in and change their Jumbotrons. That authenticity is super important.
We do, though, have in Team Builder this year, we have Build a Stadium. We’re super excited about that one. So, new to Team Builder this year, as well as you can change your Team Builder creations every single start of a season, and what’s cool about that is, if you wanted to have that progression of putting a new Jumbotron on, you can do that, or a new background, and such. So, pretty cool.
BUT WHY THO: For the defensive adjustments, we know this game’s always been very offense-heavy. How do you approach trying to help the defense? Because obviously, we have the pre-play, then you have general gameplay.
Christian McLeod: Yeah, no doubt. The biggest place where you’re gonna notice is in past coverage this year. The wide receiver DB interactions are a game-changer. You get on the sticks, you truly feel it, especially for cheese artists such as myself. Sometimes you get that dynasty on Heisman, where you’re playing your buddies, and you’re throwing drag routes underneath nonstop.
The zones are now gonna go attack those drag routes. It’s gonna change the way that you play; fundamentally, it’s always a challenge too in a college football game, because you do have the disparity in ratings a little bit larger than the NFL, where you’ve got your big-name teams, your Alabama’s, Ohio State’s, whatnot, down to the smaller schools, North Texas, and such. So we had to balance that and make it fair, so you’re still going to see a lot of wide open, explosive, big time plays steal a little bit faster on the sticks this year, much like the feel of 25.
We got a lot of good feedback from 26 players who didn’t like that we slowed it down a little bit, so we kind of made it a little faster, but yeah, you’re gonna notice it in defense, specifically in the passing game.
BUT WHY THO: Now with these adjustments, you can tell your players how you want them to play Cover 4, and you can tell them how you want them to play Cover 2. What went into defining that, whether it’s aggressive, match, or other various adjustments for coverage.
Christian McLeod: It was a situation where we knew that the game of football can be very complex. It’s a chess match, and there are a lot of people who understand certain levels and certain depths of football. What we wanted to do was make it easier for everybody to access the entire menu and go in and learn what certain adjustments did, instead of just, you know, pulling up a pre-play menu.
So now you can go on, pull up the menu, and start experimenting. You start pulling those in, and the coolest part is you can make these custom macros with a simple one-button press. You go in there and save your recipe. This is what I want to do. You press it once, it makes that adjustment, and we’re looking at that to really onboard a lot of users and take away a little bit of that fear, especially when you’re playing competitively.
There are other people who are really good at making like nine replay adjustments at once. So we’re excited to see what people do with those. Obviously, we want to share those in the future as well, get them out there, but we’re hoping that it takes that edge off a little bit, just to make more people feel like they could dive deeper into gameplay adjustments without that huge barrier of entry.
BUT WHY THO: Were there any [balance] issues between these [defensive] macros versus your play calling? How did you make sure that one doesn’t end up overpowering the other, or overriding the playcalls?
Christian McLeod: Absolutely, you had to balance it all across the board, and you’re also looking at coach adjustments as well. But what’s cool is when you pull up the macro thing, there are hundreds of options as part of that. It’s wild. It’s like you’re going to a restaurant where they’re gonna make a sandwich for you, selecting onions and peppers and some oil, or whatever it is, and so, we just want people to go in there and create.
We want to give you a sandbox and just say, “Go create and go talk with each other in the communities. What are the best cover two beaters, or what are the best adjustments on certain eye formations, or playing army? How do I shut this option game down or whatever that is? And so we want people to experiment, explore, pull those out of the ether, and then have people kind of mimic them and put them together on their own.
BUT WHY THO: There’s so many new things coming. What are you most excited for people to see in a period?
Christian McLeod: I keep saying it’s an awesome question. I’m super pumped about this game, because obviously a huge super fan. I play $500-600 not just at the office. My family loves it when I do this, but I’m most excited about the dynamic weather.
So, I’m from Detroit. I grew up watching Michigan State games, going to Michigan State games, and there’s something about the Midwest in November – it’s gray, it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s just sort of gross, and we’ve never been able to mimic that in a football game before. We’ve had always raining, or always snowing. But, it’s always the same intensity.
With the dynamic weather, now you might come into a game, and there’s a 20% chance of rain. You go in, it starts raining for two or three plays, then it clears up, and then a monsoon comes out in the second half. It is wild. You get some little snow flurries. You’re looking up at the sky, you’re getting that gray sky, not that it’s only sunny or it’s raining.
So that’s what I’m personally really excited about. The cool part, too, is that it affects gameplay, and I keep going back to the 2015 Michigan State-Ohio State game, when they were going to run away with it. I mean, that Ohio State team is awesome. We end up getting lucky, the skies open up, it starts raining, it slows them down, they can’t pass now, totally messed with the field. We have a good running game that year, and we end up beating them in a last-second field goal.
And again, without that torrential rainstorm that lasted for 50% of that game, we’re not in that game. We’re getting blown out; we don’t end up in the playoffs that year. It’s kind of like a casket apron. You now get that as part of dynasty, which is really cool, and how you’re gonna adjust.
BUT WHY THO: The big word is dynamic for weather, play, and time. It seems as if that was something you all always wanted to do for everything [in the game]? Why was that one of the focal points?
Christian McLeod: We looked at last year with the dynamic time of day. It was super important for us not just to have the dynamic time of day, but also, where are you in the country? I think it’s just because college football’s so special. So special for all of us. We’re super passionate, and the coolest part about college football is all of that randomness that happens.
In the NFL, I love the NFL. There are a lot of dome stadiums in the NFL. You can be turning on a game on Thursday out in Fort Collins, Colorado, and see a snowstorm blizzard in the middle of October, for example. There are just so many cool moments that happen there, between lighting, between weather. It’s just important for us. We want to have a living, breathing college football world. We love college football.
BUT WHY THO: What is the weirdest or your most unoriginal AD expectation that you’re excited for somebody to see?
Christian McLeod: Ooh. It’s probably, I like the ones…they’re stat ones, which are pretty cool. There are some really cool ones based on that, but I like the [AD Expectations] about facilities. I like those because it’s really cool to have that sense of progression when you start winning with a smaller school.
Maybe you’re at Kent State, and then all of a sudden Kent State looks at us, says, “Yeah, we want these elite facilities over the next three years,” and all of a sudden it throws you for a complete curveball of, well, I’ve been investing in players over here. I have to invest in my facility now. It totally changes what you do now in how you play the game, so it’s not really a weird one, but those are some of my favorite ones.