NCAA Football 25: Dynasty Mode and Multiplayer Features

EA Sports' revival of the college football franchise, now titled NCAA Football 25, marks a significant return for fans who have been waiting since 2013. While the game has evolved, retaining familiar modes and introducing new features, the Dynasty mode remains a central draw for many players. This article explores the Dynasty mode, its features, and other aspects of the game, including multiplayer capabilities.

Dynasty Mode: Building Your College Football Empire

Dynasty mode in NCAA Football 25 allows players to immerse themselves in the world of college football management, offering control over various aspects of a university's football program. While the user-provided text refers to "Maximum Football," the core concepts of dynasty mode are similar and can be used to understand the depth of NCAA Football 25.

Coach and Athletic Director Roles

In Dynasty mode, you essentially serve your university in two capacities: Coach and Athletic Director. This dual role grants you unprecedented control over decisions, from team strategy to facility upgrades, as you strive to lead your team to glory.

Team Selection and Customization

The journey begins with choosing a team to lead. You can select from over 134 licensed schools included at launch. The provided information also refers to the ability to import your own team to replace one of the existing ones. While not explicitly confirmed for NCAA Football 25, the ability to customize teams and leagues has been a staple of the series.

Key factors to consider when selecting a team include:

Overall, Offense, and Defense Ratings: These ratings provide a simple and straightforward assessment of a team's strengths and weaknesses.
Conference: The conference determines the level of competition faced throughout the season.
Location: A team's location plays a crucial role in recruiting players.
Total Budget: Each school has a preset starting budget, which is used for hiring coaches and upgrading facilities. A higher budget offers more freedom for early upgrades.

Conference Customization

The ability to customize conferences adds another layer of depth to Dynasty mode. You can move teams around, rename conferences, and upload custom logos. Each conference is assigned an overall rank based on the aggregate overalls of the teams within it.

Coaching Staff

Your coach defines every aspect of your teambuilding and Xs and Os strategy. Key factors to consider when hiring a coach include:

Coach Level: The coach's level of experience, which affects their cost to hire.
Offense and Defensive Playbook: The offensive and defensive schemes that the coach will have your team adopt.
Cost of Hiring: The one-time cost of hiring the coach.

Preseason Preparations

Preseason is a crucial period for assessing players, filling the recruiting board, and evaluating the school's facilities and stadium. These factors significantly impact the program's growth and success.

Roster Evaluation

The first step is to take a look at your roster. Identify strengths and weaknesses to determine which areas need improvement through recruiting and player development.

Recruiting: Building a Winning Team

Recruiting is the lifeblood of college football. The ability to scout talent and convince them that your school is their best chance at success is what separates competitive programs from perennial failures.

Read also: Building a Gridiron Empire

The recruiting process involves:

Identifying Prospects: Find prospects interested in your school and match your needs.
Scouting Recruits: Unlocking information about recruits to help decide whether to pursue them.
Building Relationships: Interacting with recruits to build their interest in your school.

Methods of interacting with recruits include:

Text Messages: Focus on individual areas of interest and talk more specifically about your program.
Scholarships: Offer scholarships once a recruit's interest level is high enough.
Visits: Invite recruits to visit an upcoming game. The success of the visit depends on the pitches you select and the result of the game.

Managing Prestige points, focusing on recruits, and pitching your school effectively will determine the success of your recruiting efforts. Players will commit throughout the season, requiring you to adapt your focus as needed.

In-Season Management

Each week, you will face a new opponent and try your best to climb the national ranks and win your conference. There are plenty of off-the-field responsibilities you will have to tend to throughout the season. The bulk of your recruiting responsibilities will take place throughout the season. Each week, you will be given more Prestige points to spend on scouting recruits, pitching your school, and scheduling visits.

Player and Coach Development

Throughout the season, you will accrue XP through on-field performance and by completing game, season, and career coaching challenges. XP is used to upgrade your players and your coach. Skill Areas: The ratings in Maximum Football roll up into 7 main categories: core, passing, rushing, receiving, blocking, defense, and special teams. Upgrading your coach in any of these areas reduces the XP cost of upgrades in that category.

Read also: Choosing Your NCAA Football Team

Financial Management

In the same way that your program will accrue XP week to week, your school will earn and spend money each week. You will want to make sure that you are bringing in more money than you are spending in order to have profits to spend on improving your stadium and facilities.

Revenue streams include:

Ticket Sales: You control the price of your tickets and each week, you can see how many of your available seats sold. Price your tickets too high and you won’t sell enough tickets. Price them too low and you won’t be able to cover your expenses. Attendance will also fluctuate based on the performance of your team.
Bowl Distribution: If your team reaches a bowl game at the end of the year, they will get a cut of the revenue generated from that event.
Championship Distribution: If you qualify for the post-season playoff, your team will receive a cut of the revenue based on how many rounds you made it through.

Expenses include:

College Upkeep: This is the cost to maintain your facilities (outside of your stadium).
Stadium Upkeep: As you upgrade your stadium and attract more fans, more money will be spent on maintaining your stadium.

Stadium and Facilities Upgrades

Upgrading your stadium and facilities is crucial for improving the fan experience and player development.

Stadium Upgrades: Adding new amenities to your stadium, such as expanded parking, larger scoreboards, and upgraded wi-fi, will enhance the fan experience.
Facilities Upgrades: Upgrading facilities for core, passing, rushing, receiving, blocking, defense, and special teams will lower the XP cost of upgrading your player’s stats in these areas. Upgrading these facilities also dynamically changes the facility grade for your program in recruiting.

Gameplay Options

Each week, you will take on a different opponent to try to climb the ranks to college football glory, and even with this, you have full control over!

Play: You can play the game outright.
Spectate: Want to sit back and watch the fruits of your labor? Spectate the game to watch the CPU play the CPU. In this menu, you can also choose to allow the CPU to apply earned XP and handle any unspent recruiting points.
Coaching Info: In the “Coaching Info” menu, you can change the recruitment priorities for the simulation choosing to prioritize high ranking prospects, filling team needs, and going after local prospects.

Postseason and Offseason Activities

At the end of each season, if you’ve put together a successful regular season campaign, you will find yourself in your conference championship taking on the other top team in your conference. Qualifying for this game isn’t just about bragging rights. If your team is good enough to make it to the College Football Championship Tournament at the end of the year, you will be seeded based on your end of year ranking and take on a wave of competition to compete for the trophy. For every round you advance, your team will earn additional revenue, with a championship obviously resulting in the largest amount. If you missed out on a chance to compete in the tournament, your team could still qualify to compete in a bowl. These bowl games are also fully customizable!

Once the postseason wraps up, you will have a few tasks to take care of prior to starting your next season.

High School All-Star Game: You’ve spent the entire year trying to convince the top high school athletes in the country to attend your school. Now, you can see them in action for the first time before they arrive on campus in the High School All-Star Game. You can either play the game outright or spectate and watch how the incoming class competes on the field.
Conference Realignment: Depending on how frequently you have set conference realignment, you will be able to view the promotion and relegation of teams around the country.
Offseason Drills: Each offseason, you will have the opportunity to complete a series of drills. Completing these drills will earn you additional XP that can be applied to your coach or used to upgrade your players.

Multiplayer Features

EA Sports College Football 25 offers several multiplayer modes, allowing players to compete against each other online.

Crossplay Functionality

Crossplay is a key feature, enabling players on different platforms (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S) to play together. Crossplay is enabled by default. To use crossplay, you’ll need an EA account and a subscription to the online service respective to your platform (Xbox Network or PlayStation Plus). Open the EA connect menu and type your friend’s EA account name into the search tab to send them a friend request.

The following modes support crossplay:

Road to the College Football Playoff
College Football Ultimate Team
Play a Friend

Dynasty Mode and Crossplay

Dynasty mode does not support crossplay in College Football 25. This means that you can only play Dynasty mode with other players on the same platform.

Disabling Crossplay

To disable crossplay, Xbox Series X players will have to turn it off in their system settings. PS5 players can disable crossplay through CFB 25’s in-game settings. Doing so will prohibit you from being matched with players on other platforms.

Additional Gameplay Insights

Beyond the core features, several aspects of NCAA Football 25 contribute to the overall gameplay experience.

Road to Glory

Road to Glory brings back the classic style of career mode from most of the “recent” editions of the series with a much better player creator that has many more options. What doesn’t return is the need to play through a handful of boring high school games to determine how good your player is going into the recruiting. But you do get some archetypes for how good your player is going to be to start their career from the instant superstar to the journeyman player that has to work hard to earn their starting spot.

Simulation Issues

The simulation, both during games and when advancing to the next week, has some issues. It seems like all of the teams are too closely rated to allow upsets to continuously happen at any point of the year. On one hand, that’s kind of awesome, but when Ohio State’s 2-8 with a win-less Big Ten record in 2026 as the worst team in the Big Ten while they’re rated a 90 as one of the best-rated teams in the country, it’s not working correctly.

Recruiting Complexity

Recruiting might be the most complicated system in this entire game that is confusing up front since you have the same kind of hours to spend on players, but you’re spending those hours very differently that makes me feel like I’m missing a real tutorial to this feature. It’s like you’re investing points into players’ recruitment where I largely had no clue how any of it affected the recruit’s opinion of those efforts. It makes me just want to let the AI handle it, but then I assume it’ll do a poor job at it anyway.

Gameplay Fun

Despite all of my complaints over the past several paragraphs, the gameplay itself is still a lot of fun in spite of the simulation’s desire to undermine that at every turn. The game is enjoyable when things are working well. There is just a simple joy to be had when this game is working well that is hard to deny. Defense is also fun when things are going well, though I feel like the way the game is supposed to switch to the closest player to the ball during the play doesn’t work as often as it’s supposed to work.

tags: #NCAA #Football #25 #dynasty #mode #multiplayer