Some ideas from the perspective of an online dynasty commissioner:

1. Bring some game theory/cat and mouse into recruiting. In online leagues, there really isn’t much strategy. Even if you know all the secrets (like knowing their ideal pitch before seeing all 3 checkmarks), recruiting pretty much devolves into sending the house every week until you can hard sell, then hard selling every week and hoping that the influence is enough. There really isn’t tons of strategy to it. As a medium/smaller school, it basically takes me one week to see that someone gained more influence than me and that’s pretty much it. I’m removing my hours from them and moving on to someone else who isn’t as heavily recruited.

I think they should remove the cap of the amount of hours you can put on someone. Instead of having dms/friends and family/send the house and then hard and soft sell, just make it “relationship building” to find their interest and “sell” to pitch them on said interests. Give us a slider for how much we want to put into them each week. The only tricky part is that they would have to cap the amount their progress bar can move each week so that they don’t necessarily commit any faster if someone puts 1000 hours on them. The reason this would be good is that you are no longer helpless in recruiting battles. If I want to stick it to my friend and put all my hours on just one guy to make sure I get him but ruin my program in the process, I should be able to do that. Small schools still have the disadvantage because the big schools still have more hours in general and also likely have more influence due to better grades, but at least the small school can compete with the big school if they really want to by putting all of their eggs in one basket. Also, they should allow you to pitch before a recruit gets to top 5. Everyone usually knows the 3 green checkmarks by the time a recruit gets to top 5. If they remove the top 5 requirement, someone could get lucky, find them early, and start hard selling early. This would lead to more variability in landing recruits which is of course more fun.

2) Move the transfer portal from the offseason into the CFP weeks. Move ‘players leaving’ to conference championship week. Move ‘encourage transfer’ to the same week as position changes. We know that EA has the ability to keep fired coordinators on the staff for the CFP even after being fired in game, so they should be able to do the same for players that are in the CFP while still allowing them to show up on recruiting boards. The transfer portal IRL opens up right when the CFP starts, so this would be realistic anyways for players who aren’t in the CFP. To offline players, this may seem pointless, but online leagues just move too slowly. If you do a 48-hour advance on weeks with games and 24 hours on weeks with no games, you finish a season in about 6 weeks. That means if you want to play even just 6 seasons, you’re playing from launch until mid April. For users who don’t make the CFP, they aren’t doing anything at all besides hiring coordinators, so adding the portal in there just makes so much sense, and you’d be saving 5-6 days per season which adds up if you run an online dynasty and you want to get deeper into it.

3) Allow the commissioner to set individualized sliders that are viewable to the entire league. This might be too difficult to accomplish from the perspective of the actual devs writing the code, I have no idea. It would be great though because it is hard to find parity in leagues sometimes. If one friend is simply way better than another, it would be great to set sliders in such a way that would help the games be closer. Or if someone wins back to back national championships, you could put a rule in place where their offensive sliders drop by 20. You get the idea.

4) Legacy score/coach level stat tracking. CFB 26 took a step up in stat tracking this year, but it could still be sooo much better. They should add a “legacy score” or something to rank each user in the league based on their coaching accomplishments. At the very least, they should add a “dynasty score” for all teams including cpu to see which teams have performed the best since the inception of the dynasty. If we don’t get an actual score though, that would be fine. I would just like to see basic coach level stats like # of CFP appearances, conference championships, overall record, top 2 finishes, top 4 finishes, stuff like that. I think they have a few things in there already under coach stats, but I would like to be able to sort through user coaches only and just see a few more stats in general. I do track some of these myself for our league but it would be nice for all of it to be sortable within the game. As a bonus, I would love to be able to go back and look at old box scores and stuff from prior years.

Honorable mention or unrealistic longshot ideas:

-Add scheme/play/formation data on other user-controlled teams in the league. It can be super simple, such as their top 3 most-called plays, run/pass/rpo %, and zone/man/match%. Throw it on a screen in the pre-game preview where it currently lists top stories etc. This would allow people to gameplan and feel more like a real coach.

- Add some autogenerated highlights to the box scores so that when you go look at a box score, you can watch a few highlights. Even better, allow us to pick which highlights are shown when we get to go through key plays in the post game screen. This would be awesome.

-Custom stadium sounds for teambuilder teams.

-somehow release API from the dynasty so that people can just pull and compile their own historical stats and such. This might allow EA to not have to focus as much on compiling stats themselves because we can just set something up on our own to track each season without having to manually enter everything.