The ante has been upped.

On May 29th, 2025, Electronic Arts released the official trailer to its upcoming video game release: EA Sports College Football 26. EA’s return to college football gaming after its decade long absence with a newly implemented name, image, and likeness deals was met with massive praise from critics and fans alike. The game has always been  more fluid than the Madden NFL series, along with the motions and decision making being more logical than its professional football counterpart as well. These differences in play experience are bringing extra excitement to the announcement of a new season of EA’s classic game. 

However, there will always be some amount of flaws within a gaming studio that dips its toes back into a new market. These concerns within the game mostly revolved around its career mode, titled “Road to Glory”. In this mode, players control and play through their character’s entire football career. In the new version of the game, there was no trophy room to see any accomplishments, no high school circuit to prove your worth, the archetype options for each position were extremely limited, and the gameplay and experience was extremely linear. If players played Road to Glory with one character, they weren’t missing anything by not doing it a second time.

These issues, however, seem to have been addressed.

Youtuber Bordeaux, a trusted source within the EA College Football community due to his close knit ties to the EA company, posted a list of new features to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that are supposedly being added to the Road to Glory mode:

•  Players will be able to start their character’s career in high school
• There are 10 new archetypes to choose from
• Players can build their highlight tape to earn an offer from their dream school and commit with the famous “Hat Ceremony”
• Players will be able to rise in class rankings and secure scholarships before other recruits, which indicates a mechanism that allows players to compare themselves to other players
• A new tier of abilities will be available to characters and players can build team chemistry
• The Road to Glory mode will be connected to Madden NFL’s Superstar mode

The 10 new archetypes are crucial for player engagement and experience. The widening of options to choose from for the character is a big step in making Road to Glory a more customizable and engaging experience.

The highlight tape being added is a very unique touch that most fans hadn’t thought about before as a potential new feature. EA adding it here shows that they aren’t only taking fan advice, but also incorporating their own personal ideas to make the mode better. A hat ceremony to pick a college you’re going to is another example of EA adding a real life ceremony from a player’s career into the game to improve the play experience.

The class rankings system is another interesting detail EA is implementing to motivate players to step up their performance. If they make mistakes, they may not get an opportunity to go to their dream college of choice, just like the stakes that players face in real life athletics.

Along with these Road to Glory additions, there are reports from Bordeaux that over 300 real life coaches will make an appearance in the game, a change from the game featuring no real life coaches last year. Smaller details include the rights to Metallica’s Enter Sandman for Virginia Tech’s famous walk-out song, a drone show showing the team’s logo when they are walking out of the tunnel, and finally more enhanced and detailed playbooks.

Overall, fans who enjoyed College Football 25 should be heavily anticipating the sequel game due to its enhanced features and displayed gameplay improvements.