Fans can weaponize school payouts based on usage

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…

Source link : https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2025/06/06/college-football-26-payouts-usage-fans-will-weaponize/84078722007/

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Publish date : 2025-06-06 23:59:00

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