Last year, we were over the moon with the return of the EA College Football franchise. We gave it a very glowing review overall, at least as it pertained to reintroducing the classic game.

And, in one-off tilts, it still held up pretty well. However, familiarity does often breed contempt, and the longer you played, the more you noticed the raft of missing features, unnecessary gameplay nerfs, and baffling lack of QOL and immersion mechanics that made the experience veer from stale to frustrating.

Among them:

• The lack of formation subs, a feature in every previous installment
• The lack of real FCS programs, and the ability to “step down” in prestige from your program
• Teambuilder locked behind online-only gameplay
• Horrendous blocking mechanics
• Borked physics engine, particularly with leaping ability and the ballistic arc of passing trajectories
• Uneven difficulty levels
• The lack of a tutorial
• God-mode opponent DB and woeful PC WR route-running, particularly notable on PA passing.
• Bare bones records, historic stats, season stats — even the inability to scout your opponent
• Generic awards, broken recipients, and greatly overdrafted players across the board.
• Online matchmaking, and so many others.

It wasn’t perfect, in other words. Worse, so many of these features could have been added or fixed with a hot patch or never made sense to omit in the first place — aside from sheer laziness.

Still, this January, EA said that they were listening to player feedback and would be “instituting changes.”

So, what has been changed, at least that we know of? Besides the welcome addition of a High School Road to Glory mode, the answer is “not much that won’t earn EA a few extra bucks.”

How so? Check out the creeping number of pre-order editions, Gacha pay-to-win packages, XP boosts, elite recruits, Ultimate Teams and a dizzying array of other game features paywalled behind a premium price point and augmented by microtransactions.

Then, we discovered a “partnership” deal, whereby every game would functionally become an in-game advertisement for Lowe’s. Did we discover this from EA? No. It was Lowe’s who blew the whistle:

More details about the game have emerged from an unexpected source. The home improvement chain Lowe’s has announced a collaboration with EA Sports to feature its branding in CFB 26, along with the newest EA Sports FC and Madden NFL titles.

Lowe’s branding will appear in these games “across multiple gameplay experiences,” the retailer said. For CFB 26, Lowe’s branding will show up on the broadcast overlay for the Stadium Pulse feature. This feature aims to replicate the pressure of playing an away game by making certain gameplay elements more difficult for a short period of time. Lowe’s said this draws “meaningful parallels to the passion homeowners feel when enhancing their own spaces with Lowe’s.”

What has not been discussed is the commitment to fixing the core gameplay loop, game balance, matchmaking, computer logic, recruiting, NIL, or even immersive quality of life features. Because I very much doubt any of that will be addressed — they are certainly not included in the developer’s notes.

What began last year with so much promise is shaping up to be not the good launching point towards rebuilding a franchise that we had hoped for. Rather, I fear we are staring at an annualized vehicle intended to sell add-ons, and wrapped up in a package that is just good enough to keep a core audience buying just enough games and microtransactions to do it all again next year.

That has been at the heart of the EA business model for a decade with FIFA and Madden. Expect nothing different with CFB ‘26…they’ve given us little reason to think anything will change, or that meaningful improvement will come this time around.

I’d like to say that I’m disappointed. But you can’t be disappointed if your expectations were low to begin with.

— By Chris Vannini, Sam Khan Jr. and Justin Williams

Can a presidential commission do anything substantial to change college sports?

The recent news that President Donald Trump may get involved in the prolonged effort to bring stability to college sports sparked plenty of debate on that question. But what could such a commission do, and what would the reported co-chairs, former Alabama coach Nick Saban and Texas Tech board chair and billionaire booster Cody Campbell, aim to accomplish?

Though we don’t yet know the scope of the commission or how deep it will dive into issues like name, image and likeness compensation or the transfer portal, Saban and Campbell’s past public statements provide some clues on what they might seek to address.

NIL

Saban has criticized the money flowing into the NIL market from deep-pocketed donors; Campbell is one of those donors, bankrolling Texas Tech’s recent success in player acquisition. Although NIL freedoms were designed to allow players to pursue marketing or endorsement deals, donors and their collectives quickly took to using them as a proxy for a pay-for-play system.

“To me, the biggest issue we have in college athletics is donor-induced name, image and likeness,” Saban said last fall at a panel in Dallas alongside NCAA president Charlie Baker. “Instead of doing what we’re doing now, we should be having revenue-sharing with the athletes so that their quality of life is better.”

Revenue sharing is indeed on the way, pending approval of the House v. NCAA settlement. But Saban and Campbell have expressed a desire for national NIL rules, rather than a collection of different state laws. The NCAA has long lobbied Congress for federal NIL legislation, to no avail. A bipartisan group of senators, led by Ted Cruz (R-Texas), continues to work on the issue, but nothing appears imminent.

Campbell, who has written several op-eds about college sports for The Federalist, advocated in April for an antitrust exemption that would allow a governing body to enact a single set of rules to supersede the “patchwork of 34 different state laws” that currently exist.

The House settlement, if it’s approved, will establish a revenue-sharing cap of at least $20 million that schools can distribute to athletes, and the Power 4 leaders are planning to create an enforcement organization for traditional NIL, but it’s not yet clear whether that will slow pay-for-play “NIL” as we know it today.

Texas Tech board chair and billionaire Cody Campbell has written several op-eds about college sports for The Federalist. (Mateo Rosiles/ Avalanche-Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)

Transfer portal

Campbell hasn’t written much about the portal, and Texas Tech has been an active user in recent years. Saban, however, has criticized the transfer rules for their effect on team chemistry and graduation rates.

“I’m all for the players, and I want the players to benefit, and I think we went far too long without the players being able to benefit,” Saban said last year. “But the system that we have right now makes it much more difficult for a coach to really create the culture on this team, because guys can leave whenever they want. So they don’t have to make the same kind of commitment that we all had to make, in terms of, how did you value your college experience?”

Restricting player movement hasn’t come up much in congressional hearings compared to the financial concerns, but the question of whether outgoing players should owe contract buyouts has gained steam as revenue sharing approaches. Arkansas’ NIL collective is currently looking to collect a buyout from quarterback Madden Iamaleava, who signed with Arkansas in December but has since transferred to UCLA.

Non-revenue sports

Despite their shared backgrounds in college football, Saban and Campbell have expressed concern over the impact on Olympic and non-revenue sports as more money shifts toward football and basketball.

“Of 134 FBS schools, 90 or more could lose funding for Olympic sports, women’s teams, and even football itself (not to mention the FCS and Division II),” Campbell wrote in March on The Federalist. “Local towns could crumble. Smaller colleges would fade. College sports would shrink from a national treasure to an elite clique, and countless dreams would be crushed.”

Saban cited Alabama’s softball team, one of the best in the country, as a winning program that doesn’t make money.

“What people don’t understand about college athletics, in my opinion, it’s not a business,” Saban said last September. “It’s revenue-producing. … Nobody takes a profit in college athletics. What do we do with the money? We reinvest it in the players and opportunities for non-revenue sports, so that they have an opportunity to graduate and compete.”

A large part of that cost also includes growing salaries for coaches, but Saban and Campbell both seem interested in finding ways for football — and, to a lesser extent, basketball — to continue funding non-revenue college sports under a reformed system.

Conference media rights/super leagues

Though Campbell called for antitrust protections, he doesn’t want to give those protections solely to the Power 4 leagues, even with his ties to Texas Tech and the Big 12, and said that any solutions must be “maximally inclusive” of the 130-plus Football Bowl Subdivision schools.

“Give the Autonomy Four (especially the Big 10 and SEC) a free antitrust hall pass, and they’ll build a super conference, a gilded monopoly that starves everyone else of the revenue needed to provide opportunity to more than 500,000 student athletes per year,” he wrote in March.

Saban, meanwhile, has said in the past that he’d like power conference schools to only schedule each other.

Campbell has written that the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 should be opened up to allow a broadcasting antitrust exemption for college sports as it does for pro sports, which could allow the entire FBS to pool and negotiate its broadcast rights collectively. Last week, Cruz remarked in a Senate committee hearing on streaming that the concept was something worth looking into, while also sharing concern about the NFL bumping up against protected late-season college football windows.

The SBA is one of the first major hurdles faced by recent Super League proposals from private equity groups that would include all of FBS or only the Power 4. The Big Ten and SEC have shown no interest in concepts that would lessen their financial advantage, but Campbell shares similar views with those promoting the Super League ideas: An antitrust exemption would lead to more money for everyone.

“The big and storied programs will continue to retain an advantage because of their massive ticket sales, donor support, and ability to monetize licensing and merchandise,” Campbell wrote, “but the smaller schools will at least be able to maintain solvent athletic departments and support non-revenue sports.”

Campbell has also advocated for “geographic sense” for conference alignment, expressing concern about travel time and the loss of rivalries. Finding a way to unwind conference realignment seems difficult, but it’s a topic any casual fan of college sports, including members of Congress, would understand.

Student-athlete employment status

The issue of employee or collective bargaining status for college athletes is not directly addressed in the House settlement, but it is expected to be one of the next high-profile legal battles in the industry.

Saban and Campbell have expressed desires for college athletes to remain students and for college sports to maintain some semblance of an academic model.

“Establishing this non-employee status will help to limit the cost burden of sponsoring an intercollegiate sport, and ensure that benefits like a scholarship are not taxable as income,” Campbell wrote in April.

Campbell also noted the Title IX implications of this debate: “(T)he proper application of Title IX with respect to the payment of student athletes must be made clear in order to prevent another wave of disruptive litigation.”

It’s yet to be seen who else will be on this presidential commission, what it will focus on and whether it will actually influence anything. But its existence would put more focus on doing something.

“My only hope is that leadership can emerge and consensus can be found in Washington before it’s too late,” Campbell wrote in April. “There are solutions, and the problems can be solved in a bipartisan manner. It is only a matter of will, engagement, and attention from well-intentioned individuals who wish to perpetuate the legacy and impact of the great American institution of Intercollegiate Athletics for all of its participants — not just for a privileged few.”

Saban for years has worked as a de facto voice of the sport, especially in his role at ESPN, and Campbell laid the political groundwork with his writing. The pair may soon have the ability to drive even more of the conversation for actual change.

“If we can just get it together and put it together, we’d have a great system,” Saban said. “I think the future of college football is great. I really do. I’m not down on the game. I’m just down on the system of how we get money to players. That’s got to be fixed.”

(Top photo of Nick Saban and Donald Trump: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

May 1, 2025

Breaking Down Bill Belichick’s Odd UNC Start With Michael Felder

In this college football podcast episode, Michael Felder (Bleacher Report, Stadium, Substack, et al) joins the show to give his perspective of Bill Belichick’s first few months as head coach at North Carolina. Felder, given his proximity to the UNC community as a former player and alum has thoughts on the hire itself, the current …