The whole sport, in your hands

There are 19,299 high schools in this game, 670 college programs and three professional leagues, and they are all playing whether you are watching them or not. A sophomore at a school nobody scouts can be starting in the pros seven years later. You can be the coach at any point along that line, or at several of them, one job after another.

High school

You take a job in a state and coach whichever kids walked through the door. There is a budget and it is small. You can put it into the weight room, or into keeping the assistants you have, or into a film system that gets your seniors seen, or into a youth camp that will not do anything for you for four years. District games, classification playoffs, the whole bracket. Your seniors go into the same recruiting pool the college programs in your save are working from, so they turn up later with someone else's logo on.

College

FBS, FCS, Division II and Division III, all live at the same time. Recruiting boards, official visits, NIL money that runs out before your board does, scholarship limits, and a transfer portal that will take your starting quarterback in December. Every division feels different, and you can choose whether you want to climb up or start at the very top.

The pros

Three leagues. Contracts, a salary cap, trades, waivers, a combine, and a draft you can either run yourself or sit through. Two of those leagues are smaller and poorer than the other, and they are full of players who are one decent season away from a phone call, which is where you end up shopping when your cap situation is bad.

You do not have to simulate all of it

Every league runs at full detail, ticks over quietly in the background, or is switched off completely. Leave the levels you are not coaching in the background and you will still get their results, their draft classes and their coaching vacancies without waiting on them.

Gameplans

Six offensive identities, air raid through power run, and then a lot of smaller dials underneath them: tempo, run and pass split by down, how often you line up in shotgun, which personnel grouping you live in, blitz rate by down, coverage shell. You can point the offense at a corner you have scouted as weak, or steer it away from an edge rusher you cannot block. Set a carry share for your back and a target share for your receiver and the engine will try to honour it, though fatigue, eligibility, the situation and the opponent all get a vote.

Then sim the game, read it play by play, or open the 2D engine and call it down by down.

Your career

Head coach, coordinator or general manager, and an archetype underneath that: recruiter, tactician, motivator, developer, CEO. You interview for jobs and the interview can go badly. Reputation moves after games, after media days, and after the boosters either get what you promised them or do not. Skill points come with levels, and the jobs that appear in your inbox are the ones your record has earned, which at the start is not many.

Eras

Start anywhere from 1950. The postseason changes as you move through them, because it did.

• Split poll, 1950 to 1997
  
• BCS, 1998 to 2013
  
• Four-team playoff, 2014 to 2023
  
• Twelve-team playoff, 2024 onward

The editor

None of this is real, and all of it can be changed. Teams, players, coaching staffs, logos, branding, conferences, league history, across college and all three pro leagues. It is a tab in the game rather than a modding framework you have to learn.

Other things that are in here

• Four difficulty levels
  
• Injuries, morale, training camp, player progression
  
• Season history, records, awards, a Hall of Fame
  
• Press conferences, media days, message boards, and a mailbox that fills up faster than you will read it
  
• Conference realignment, or custom conferences if you would rather draw the map yourself

New in 2.0

• High school is now a full career rather than a feeder system. Budget and projects, captains, injuries, state playoff brackets, and seniors who feed the colleges in your save.
  
• Division III, properly. Its own playoff, its own portal, its own coaching carousel.
  
• Two more professional leagues, with players moving between all three.
  
• The editor now covers every pro league instead of college only.
  
• A lot of performance work. Simulation, season rollover and saving are all considerably faster than they were.