Thanks for the reply @EA_Atic!
I called EA for the third time yesterday to try to understand what was going on. The woman I spoke with was very helpful and had me do an msconfig to see how my ram was doing. It showed that less than half of the 8 gigs that I have were "available". I must have quite a few background programs running... I'm thinking it must be a ram problem as the game needs 8 gigs of free ram, not just 8 installed on the laptop.
Today I took a screenshot in task manager while the game is open and have attached it to show a few more things I noticed.
My GPU appears to be running at 100% but when I look into the details it shows that it is using just under half of the 4GB allotted to it. I'm assuming that once again this is because of my ram issue. Can a lack of ram bottleneck my GPU? Its a Geforce GTX 1050 Ti.
CPU appears fine
As far as overheating, I'm not sure... the laptop does get pretty warm and the fans run pretty good while in game. I'm assuming that is normal while running a game and maybe getting more ram will help things not work so hard. I've thought about replacing the thermal paste but not sure if that is necessary or will even help.
Thanks again!