Madden NFL 26 - Franchise Deep Dive

Franchise fans, we hope you’re sitting down. To put it bluntly, this is the biggest Franchise Mode update we’ve made in over a decade. This Deep Dive will walk you through all the details of what we’ve been working on and we hope you’ll see why we couldn’t be more excited to finally share it with you.

Our development team is incredibly passionate about Franchise Mode. We’re longtime fans just like you, and we’ve poured that passion into every part of this year’s update.

For Madden NFL 26, we focused on three major areas to bring you the most comprehensive improvements yet. Our goal was to make Franchise deeper, more dynamic and more true to the NFL experience:

First, we want you to Feel Like a Real NFL Head Coach every single week, all season long. Whether it’s building your staff, adjusting your strategy or preparing for your next opponent, your decisions will matter more than ever.

Second, we focused on making sure Every Game Feels Different. From AI behavior and player traits to weather effects and opponent tendencies, each matchup should feel unique and bring new challenges to the table.

And finally, we know you want Every Week to Feel Different. You want Monday Nights to feel special. You want to feel the shift in atmosphere when the calendar flips to December. You want to see what’s going on around the league via Halftime Shows and a Weekly Recap. 

We’re delivering ALL of that this year.

Before we get into the new features, I wanted to talk about our number one priority.

We want screens to load quicker, and we definitely know you want them to load quicker. We spent a lot of time early in our development cycle focusing on how quickly our screens load. We agree that they felt sluggish and wanted to make sure we addressed that right away. We’ve spent a lot of time tracking the loading speed and fixing issues related to that. It may not be the most exciting change to the mode this year, but we know you’ll appreciate it and it should definitely improve your experience.

Now - let’s kick things off with your all-new coaching experience.

Coach Creation

In order to make sure your coach feels like you, they need to look the part. Custom coaches got a massive overhaul, with 200 new heads to choose from when creating your coach.

To read the entire Madden NFL 26 Deep dive, please click on the link below.

https://www.ea.com/games/madden-nfl/madden-nfl-26/news/madden-26-gridiron-notes-franchise-deep-dive

Okay so let's be real, I checked out the deep dive, and so far nothing EA is showing is making me want to buy the game. They talk about adding new heads, how about customizing the whole person from hair, facial hair, size, more detail like 2k does. Oh new already made outfits, which could be customized by the players. Add in adding much for the coaches, yet anything new for people who want to be the owners? Moving along to draft logic, which makes sense since the game made some bad choices...(49ers having Brock and drafting Cam Ward in the first round) but the scouting is still broken, like so horrible that I don't waste my time. What else, making the game feel like a monday night, thursday night and Sunday night games now matter, serious wtf. Oh yes add the weather which some how matters now, throwing in the long over due halftime which really is not a big deal. 

So in point the latest deep dive is showing the Long time fans of EA are simple not listening to the people who buy the game, talk about being franchise supports yet the mode once again is sucking up. EA Get Fired, give up and let another company make the game, cause you can't match 2K5 which is 15 old game. 

Really feels like you guys are going out of your way to do absolutely EVERYTHING related to coaches except bringing back a legit Coach Mode.

What the hell is the point of having so much emphasis on all aspects of coaching when the most basic element -- coaching the game -- is still not possible. The current "coach mode" is crap and we all know it.

Investing so much development time in all these new coach features is crazy to me since you still have to control the players. That makes coaching irrelevant.

It's been over 10 years now since we had a true Coach Mode. What gives? It can't possibly be that hard of a code change. 

This is one of the reason some of us fans want the NFL to open the game back to multiple companies, cause EA clearly doesn't care about the people. As long as they keep getting paid for UT, they will put out crap while calling it the best game yet. I love coach mode, wish the ideas would put better use, cause not everyone wants to be Reid and want his Dna. I am in support of not buying the game just so NFL wakes up and opens it back up to other companies. 

I didn't see any mention about connected franchises