5 petty ways fans can weaponize EA Sports usage payouts in College Football 26
5 petty ways fans can weaponize EA Sports usage payouts in College Football 26
After the success of last year's revival, EA Sports' College Football 26 is set to release on July 10.
Details are slowly beginning to trickle out about the game, but on the business side, Cllect's Matt Liberman dropped something of a bombshell on Friday. In this year's release, schools will be compensated directly in the form of royalties depending on how often players use them in-game.
While it's not exactly clear how EA Sports is quantifying that, it seems to be based on the total number of games played with each team.
Directly tying payouts to gamers' usage puts at least a little bit of power in the hands of the player, and if there's one thing we know about hardcore college football fans, it's that their pettiness knows no bounds.
This system seems primed to be weaponized by fans. Here are just a few possible ways they might be able to do it.
Boycotting rivals
If you're anything like me, the first thing you're going to do when you boot up the game for the first time is start into a "play now" match with your favorite team in one of its highly anticipated rivalry games in the upcoming season. Would the rival school receiving compensation for it complicate things, however?
Fans don't often get the chance to hit their most hated teams where it hurts (financially speaking), but now they do — albeit at the margins. Will an Auburn fan think twice about recreating the Iron Bowl in College Football 26, knowing that Alabama would directly benefit from it? Perhaps not, but it's worth considering.
Payback against the SEC
For nearly two decades now, the SEC has widely been viewed as the most dominant conference in college football, and the perception of preferential treatment toward the league has certainly rubbed practically every other fan base the wrong way.
Well, now you, dear reader, have the chance to stick it to not just the conference but Greg Sankey himself by refusing to play with any SEC teams. Enjoy it. Savor it.
Will enough SEC haters coalesce to put a noticeable dent in the league's coffers? Unlikely. But moderately annoying Sankey is absolutely on the table.
Only playing as Group of Five programs
While we're at it, the Big Ten and Tony Petitti often skate by in these conversations, but the conference is right there with the SEC every step of the way these days. After all, both are pushing for a model where each league would receive four automatic bids to the College Football Playoff.
Wouldn't you like to get some payback? Well, now you can by refusing to play as any teams from the two most powerful conferences. And why stop there? Why not just ignore the Power Four entirely?
Group of Five teams are more fun to play as in dynasty mode, anyway, and if you've yet to play a night game in Laramie, Wyoming, in College Football 25, I highly recommend.
Strategically simming dynasty matchups
While players control the matchups in the play now and online modes, the same cannot be said for dynasty mode or Road to Glory, where conference schedules are generated automatically and are uneditable. There is a workaround, though: Just sim the games against the schools you are trying to punish financially.
Sure, that may make those modes slightly less fun. But knowing you're robbing your most despised institutions of those precious cents in royalties is all the reward you'll need.
Starting and immediately exiting games
While it's admittedly not yet clear exactly which metrics EA will base its payouts on, it seems to focus more on games played than time spent with the team. It doesn't take a wild imagination to see how this system would be ripe for abuse.
If you're trying to bolster your school's payout, you could very easily start a game and immediately exit before repeating until you get bored. Even if EA required a game to be completed, nothing is stopping you from starting up a CPU vs. CPU game and walking away.
It's even conceivable that a more enterprising fan could rig up a bot to automatically play the games and take the human tedium out of the process entirely. That may seem far-fetched to you, but you should never underestimate how petty college football fans are willing to get.
You've been warned, EA Sports.
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This figures to have an outsize impact on Olympic-sport athletes, whose scholarships cost as much as that of a football player but whose sports don't produce revenue. There are concerns that the pipeline of college talent for Team USA will take a hit. A: The new enforcement arm seems ripe for litigation. There are also the issues of collective bargaining and whether athletes should flat-out be considered employees, a notion the NCAA and schools are generally not interested in, despite Tennessee athletic director Danny White's suggestion that collective bargaining is a potential solution to a lot of headaches. NCAA President Charlie Baker has been pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption that would protect college sports from another series of lawsuits but so far nothing has emerged from Capitol Hill.
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A $2.8 billion settlement will change college sports forever. Here's how
A federal judge has approved terms of a sprawling $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that will upend the way college sports have been run for more than a century. In short, schools can now directly pay players through licensing deals — a concept that goes against the foundation of amateurism that college sports was built upon. Some questions and answers about this monumental change for college athletics: Q: What is the House settlement and why does it matter? A: Grant House is a former Arizona State swimmer who sued the defendants (the NCAA and the five biggest athletic conferences in the nation). His lawsuit and two others were combined and over several years the dispute wound up with the settlement that ends a decades-old prohibition on schools cutting checks directly to athletes. Now, each school will be able to make payments to athletes for use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). For reference, there are nearly 200,000 athletes and 350 schools in Division I alone and 500,000 and 1,100 schools across the entire NCAA. Q: How much will the schools pay the athletes and where will the money come from? A: In Year 1, each school can share up to about $20.5 million with their athletes, a number that represents 22% of their revenue from things like media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne famously told Congress 'those are resources and revenues that don't exist.' Some of the money will come via ever-growing TV rights packages, especially for the College Football Playoff. But some schools are increasing costs to fans through 'talent fees,' concession price hikes and 'athletic fees' added to tuition costs. Q: What about scholarships? Wasn't that like paying the athletes? A: Scholarships and 'cost of attendance' have always been part of the deal for many Division I athletes and there is certainly value to that, especially if athletes get their degree. The NCAA says its member schools hand out nearly $4 billion in athletic scholarships every year. But athletes have long argued that it was hardly enough to compensate them for the millions in revenue they helped produce for the schools, which went to a lot of places, including multimillion-dollar coaches' salaries. They took those arguments to court and won. Q: Haven't players been getting paid for a while now? A: Yes, since 2021. Facing losses in court and a growing number of state laws targeting its amateurism policies, the NCAA cleared the way for athletes to receive NIL money from third parties, including so-called donor-backed collectives that support various schools. Under House, the school can pay that money directly to athletes and the collectives are still in the game. Q: But will $20.5 million cover all the costs for the athletes? A: Probably not. But under terms of the settlement, third parties are still allowed to cut deals with the players. Some call it a workaround, but most simply view this as the new reality in college sports as schools battle to land top talent and then keep them on campus. Top quarterbacks are reportedly getting paid around $2 million a year, which would eat up about 10% of a typical school's NIL budget for all its athletes. Q: Are there any rules or is it a free-for-all? A: The defendant conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12) are creating an enforcement arm that is essentially taking over for the NCAA, which used to police recruiting violations and the like. Among this new entity's biggest functions is to analyze third-party deals worth $600 or more to make sure they are paying players an appropriate 'market value' for the services being provided. The so-called College Sports Commission promises to be quicker and more efficient than the NCAA. Schools are being asked to sign a contract saying they will abide by the rules of this new structure, even if it means going against laws passed in their individual states. Q: What about players who played before NIL was allowed? A: A key component of the settlement is the $2.7 billion in back pay going to athletes who competed between 2016-24 and were either fully or partially shut out from those payments under previous NCAA rules. That money will come from the NCAA and its conferences (but really from the schools, who will receive lower-than-normal payouts from things like March Madness). Q: Who will get most of the money? A: Since football and men's basketball are the primary revenue drivers at most schools, and that money helps fund all the other sports, it stands to reason that the football and basketball players will get most of the money. But that is one of the most difficult calculations for the schools to make. There could be Title IX equity concerns as well. Q: What about all the swimmers, gymnasts and other Olympic sports athletes? A: The settlement calls for roster limits that will reduce the number of players on all teams while making all of those players – not just a portion – eligible for full scholarships. This figures to have an outsize impact on Olympic-sport athletes, whose scholarships cost as much as that of a football player but whose sports don't produce revenue. There are concerns that the pipeline of college talent for Team USA will take a hit. Q: So, once this is finished, all of college sports' problems are solved, right? A: The new enforcement arm seems ripe for litigation. There are also the issues of collective bargaining and whether athletes should flat-out be considered employees, a notion the NCAA and schools are generally not interested in, despite Tennessee athletic director Danny White's suggestion that collective bargaining is a potential solution to a lot of headaches. NCAA President Charlie Baker has been pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption that would protect college sports from another series of lawsuits but so far nothing has emerged from Capitol Hill.
