College Football 25 Dynasty Beginner's Guide

In this College Football 25 Dynasty Beginner's Guide, we'll show you how the ropes of CFB 25's biggest mode. In Dynasty Mode, your goal is to lead your school to greatness for up to 30 seasons. You can begin your journey as a Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, or Defensive Coordinator. However, Dynasty is more than just playing games and advancing the week (though you could do that, but we don't recommend it). You'll need to recruit talent from High School or the Transfer Portal, manage your coaching staff (if you're a HC), and upgrade your abilities to become a better leader for your team.

College Football 25 Dynasty Beginner's Guide – What Is Dynasty?

Overall, Dynasty Mode is the Franchise mode of College Football 25. Generally, you aim to prove you're a great coach by performing well in your duties and helping your team win games. But Dynasty is a bit more complicated than that. Without further ado, let's begin at the starting point.

Rosters & Dynasty Settings – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

After choosing an offline or online Dynasty, you'll select the roster. You'll be asked if you want to use the default rosters that came packaged with the game, or the active rosters that EA Sports will update throughout the season. Choose the latter if you want the most up-to-date rosters.

Afterward, you'll have the option to customize your league's conferences and setup. These settings range from difficulty, quarter lengths, and other commissioner tools. These rules can always be changed later in case you want to change something.

You can also customize the structure and rules of all 11 conferences in the game. For example, if you want to restore the Pac-12 to its former glory and bring some teams back, you can do that. Furthermore, you can even customize different conference rules such as:

• Divisions & Division names
• Number of Conference Games
• Conference Championship Game on/off
• Championship Game location and selection criteria

Selecting a School – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

Now, I'm sure you've seen the thousands of articles and YouTube videos telling you what school you should run your Dynasty with. I'm here to tell you to ignore every one and just pick who you want. You can always sign with another school throughout your 30-year career if you feel your first destination didn't work out.

However, there are a couple of things you'll want to keep in mind when selecting your school:

Each school is graded on 14 different factors that may affect what recruits will come your way:

Some grades, like Proximity to Home, Academic Prestige, and Campus Lifestyle can't be improved. However, all other grades can still be improved as you attempt to increase your Team Prestige.

Conference Prestige is also somewhat out of your control, considering it's based on the strength of your conference. However, you can always force a team to win via the schedule menu later on.

Team Prestige is the composite value of all your school grades. So the better your grades are, the better your Team Prestige is. This is important for recruiting high-rated prospects.

Once you know about these two things, feel free to select whatever school you want. Keep in mind that you can always use a different playbook from another school. For example, I made a Dynasty with the Kansas Jayhawks, but opted to use Temple's offensive playbook. Therefore, feel free to experiment with different playbooks, or create your own to find the right plays for you.

Now that we know what school we're choosing it's time to select our Head Coach.

Coach Background – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

When first beginning Dynasty Mode, you'll have the choice of starting as a Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, and Defensive Coordinator. If it's your first time playing Dynasty, we recommend selecting Head Coach, since you'll be able to manage everything about your team.

If you decide to start as a coordinator, you can still receive Head coaching opportunities in the future. However, just know you'll only be able to manage one side of the team, as opposed to the whole.

Afterward, you can decide on whether you want to create a head coach or use the game's pre-made one. We recommend creating your own Head Coach so you can choose your Pipeline (more on this later). Additionally, it's a lot of fun to create your coach.

Regardless of which position you take, you'll get to select one of three backstories:

• Motivator – Unlocks Motivator skill tree, which influences player ratings and composure
• Recruiter – Unlocks Recruiter skill tree, which influences player recruitment
• Tactician – Unlocks Tactician skill tree, which influences schemes and player ratings

Recruiter is by far the best backstory you want to start with in College Football 25. This backstory lets you upgrade your Recruiter Skill tree right away, giving you the upper hand in gathering the best players in the country. While it'll take a while to upgrade the tree, having it unlocked already will save you lots of time later on.

When you finish creating your coach, you'll see how your school has fared over the last 20 years. You'll also see the Goal the team has listed for you in your first year. It's important to meet this goal to raise your job security. Job security not only affects your school's grades and prestige, but it also affects your future as a coach.

When you're ready, sign your contract and get ready to coach your new school!

Understanding The Menus – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

When you finally begin Dynasty, you might feel bombarded by all the different menus and things you need to do. Have no fear, as we'll break down each menu and explain what they do first.

In the Actions Menu, you'll be able to Play games, visit your recruiting board, and check out the top stories. When you first begin Dynasty, you'll also be able to customize your schedule. This menu lets you remove and add new games to your schedule. For example, if you want your Boise State Broncos to play a tougher team than FCS Northwest, you can edit that game or remove it completely. You can swap bye weeks or even change the location of the game.

However, you must play 12 games a season, and you cannot edit conference games. We'll focus on the Recruiting Board in a bit. For now, let's look at the other menus.

The CFB 25 Menu is where you'll find all sorts of information regarding rankings. From Preseason Top 25 rankings, Team schedules, Bowl Projections, a CFB Bracket, and Heisman Watch, this is where you'll find info on awards and ranks.

The Coach Menu is where you can spend coins on abilities, check out your XP goals to level up, look at your contracts, or edit your scheme or coach.

In the Team Menu, you'll customize your depth chart, view your roster, activate Auto Subs, look at your injury report, practice, and view your Redshirts.

Stats & Records, as the name suggests, shows off the stats of your team and coach. Overall, there are stats for the Team, Coach, Season, and Career, as well as team/player records.

Lastly, Dynasty Central is where you can edit the league settings, XP and Gameplay sliders, user settings, league members, or Retire. But we're not retiring any time soon, as it's time to start our coaching career.

We'll reference some of these menus later on.

Coach Abilities & XP – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

We mentioned this in our Recruiting guide, but you will receive XP in College Football 25 Dynasty. Every time you level up, you earn coins you can spend on your skill trees. Depending on the backstory you chose, you'll only be able to upgrade that tree in the beginning. However, as you keep playing, you'll unlock new skill trees, with new abilities you can purchase.

If you selected the Recruiter backstory, feel free to spend coins on your Recruiter Skill Tree. However, we recommend you take a look at your roster to determine what players you'll need next year. Make sure to spend these coins before you begin your recruiting process, as they'll help you out in the long run.

Now it's time to set up our Recruiting Board.

Recruiting – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

We covered Recruiting in our extensive Recruiting guide. However, we still want to label a few important points for those who want something more condensed. Therefore, we listed below the main points of recruiting:

• You have a dedicated amount of hours every week to scout and recruit players
• To scout a new player, you must visit the Prospect List and select them
• Each prospect has their interests, which you'll need to learn about via scouting and influencing. Your school grade may impact a recruit's interest in your school.
• You can spend up to 50 hours per week on recruiting a new player. There are multiple ways to influence a player, including:
  • Searching Social Media (5 hours per week)
  • DM the Player (10 hours per week)
  • Contact the player's Friends and Family (25 hours per week)
  • Send the House (50 hours per week)
  • Offer a Scholarship (5 hours per week, Limited!)
  • *Schedule a Visit (40 hours for visit)
• You can also spend that time Pitching your school to the player if you know their interests. However, you can only pitch to the player when you've entered their top five schools.
  • Soft Sell – 20 hours
  • Hard Sell – 40 hours
  • Sway – 30 Hours
• When you receive a Verbal commitment, you're more than likely to sign that prospect
• If a prospect doesn't want you, you'll be locked out of recruiting them
• There are Two Signing days:
  • Early Signing Day – Bowl Season
  • National Signing Day – 7 weeks after National Championship

*Scheduling a visit does not take time away from the weekly amount of time you spend on a recruit. However, it does take the total amount of hours you have for just one week. So if you really want that 5-star prospect, we recommend Sending the House and Scheduling a visit as soon as you enter a player's top 5 schools.

We still recommend you check out our guide on Recruiting so that you have a sense of how the system works.

Transfer Portal – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

The Transfer Portal essentially acts the same as the regular recruiting process. You'll need to influence, and convince players to transfer to your school. However, there is one major difference.

The Transfer Portal opens up later in the season and runs for a limited amount of time. Therefore, if you see a player you really want, then make sure to spend all available hours on that player. Because of the Transfer Portal's short duration, you won't have much time to influence players.

Conversely, you'll need to watch out for any players leaving your school for the Transfer Portal. If a WR isn't getting Playing Time, or if he wants more Brand Exposure, he might leave your school for another. Therefore, it's even more important to maintain your high school grades and keep winning on the field.

Managing Player Health – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

College Football 25 introduces a new Wear & Tear system that indicates your players' health. There are several ways to check out your player's health:

1. Player Reticle – Left side indicates Wear & Tear, while the right side indicates fatigue
2. Depth Chart – Wear & Tear Panel can be located on the bottom right
3. Coach Vision – Hold LT+RS (or L2+RS) to view Wear & Tear status
4. Picture In Picture – in the play call menu
5. Get Up Animations – Different animations will indicate how damage to certain parts is affecting each player
6. Dynasty Player Card

The Wear & Tear colors range from white to red. If you're player's limbs are white or yellow, your risk of injury is low. However, if you're in the orange or red zones, make sure to rest that player. Because Wear & Tear doesn't just affect the guy who's hurt.

The more Wear & Tear your player receives, the more their attributes go down. For example, you could see a HB multiple Strength points on his attributes because of how much damage he took.

Overall, because you'll have so many players on your team, it's important to spread the ball around and keep stars healthy. A good rule of thumb is to bench a player if you're up by several scores. Furthermore, if your star HB just recorded 30+ touches, it might be a good idea to sub him out.

Feel free to use the game's Auto Subs menu in the Team menu to help configure a balanced rotation for your key players. Furthermore, this will help younger guys on your squad get some much-needed experience.

Gameplay, Difficulty, Sliders – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

If it's your first time playing College Football 25, there's no shame in starting on Freshman or Varsity difficulty. While the game shares some similar qualities to Madden NFL, it feels unique enough on its own that you need to learn it. Once you get the hang of it, you can adjust the difficulty at any point during the season, except when you're actually in a game.

If you want a little more control over your gameplay experience, check out the Sliders section in settings. These can be adjusted in-game and while in the menus. Furthermore, you're able to adjust both user and CPU sliders.

Do you want your receivers to have a better chance of catching the ball? There's a slider for that. Do you want the CPU Defensive Backs to have less luck when attempting an interception? With sliders, you have greater control over your gameplay experience.

Miscellaneous – College Football 25 Dynasty Guide

For those who want a more relaxed experience, here are a few settings to make your life easier:

• Use the XP Sliders menu to change how much XP your players receive. You could boost the XP output to have some cracked players by the end of your first season
  • Likewise, the League Sliders can also be adjusted
• Use the Free Practice Mode to try out different playbooks and test different plays

Overall, that wraps up our College Football 25 Dynasty mode guide for Beginners. We hope this guide helps you understand the structure of the mode a bit more. And if possible, we encourage you to make an Online Dynasty with friends. Feel free to check out our other guides on Passing, Mental Abilities, Kicking, and more.

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