Taking a CUT at College Ultimate Team
'If you’re a complete newbie, the learning process is brutal.'
Let’s eat the elephant in the room in one bite: College Ultimate Team is Ultimate Team.
The challenges you have to face to progress are tedious, and it’s very clearly designed to take an annoyingly long time, so even decent players have to think that opening their wallets might be an excellent way to relieve the pain. We’ve seen all that before.
However, College Football 25’s original sin is hiding all the tutorial content inside Ultimate Team.
Madden’s excellent Skills Trainer will walk you through everything from basic gameplay to identifying and beating certain defensive coverages.
Not here.
Instead, it’s been replaced with Ultimate Team Challenges, and the change is as bad as it sounds.
One early challenge put me inside the red zone and asked me to throw a lob pass for some reason. (You know, the kind you throw on deep balls after your receiver beats their corner and is running free down the field, not to cover 10 yards for a touchdown.)
And because it’s Ultimate Team and not the Skills Trainer, you have to choose the right play from your playbook and make the pass in a single try. Otherwise, you’re staring at the “Challenge Failed” message over and over and over again.
Remember, this is meant to be a tutorial – but it’s the kind of teacher who doesn’t teach you much.
There are no tutorials outside of Ultimate Team.
None. (And no, the mini-games don’t count.)
There’s nothing that will teach you to read defenses, learn route combinations, or understand play concepts. If you don’t know how to tell Cover One from Cover 3, College Football 25 is not interested in helping you.
If you haven’t played an NCAA game before (reminder: the last one came out in 2013) and don’t know how recruiting works, you’ll probably need to watch a YouTube video. If you’d like to learn about the differences between a Spread, Option, and Air Raid offense, you won’t be able to do it in-game.
Madden spawned a cottage industry of YouTubers and websites whose sole goal is to explain How Things Work TM, and College Football 25 will be great for their business.
I’m sure it’s cheaper to leave all of this to the community or a webpage instead of developing tutorials or other teaching tools.
Still, I’m not a fan of going to YouTube or Reddit whenever I have a question, and I’m familiar with these games. If you’re a complete newbie, the learning process is brutal.
You shouldn’t have to leave a game to learn how to play it, but you will because the tutorials are hidden in Ultimate Team, and even if you find them, they’re not very good.
It’s hard not to be deeply cynical about this design choice. Indeed, EA could have refined the Skills Trainer, a decade old, into College Football 25.
The only reason to do it this way is to corral new players into CUT so they can fall down the money hole – of course, it’s somewhat self-defeating that they have to figure out that the tutorials are in CUT in the first place, which is something College Football 25 doesn’t tell you. I would’ve just assumed that there were no tutorials at all. EA simply wanted college football-curious folk who didn’t regularly play Madden (or spend the last decade modding NCAA Football 14) to wander around aimlessly until they figured it out. In actuality, EA wants all of us to get hooked on CUT and spend lots and lots of money.
I’m not sure which is worse.
Squads
My favorite part of CUT by far is playing squads with the homies. If you don’t know, squads are in three-player mode. You can control offense, defense, or be a coach.
We’ve had some intense games and have had a lot of fun. I wish they would focus more energy on this part of the mode, but that isn’t how things work.
Here are some of my favorite clips that I’ve captured.
Brandon Scobey is a Featured Columnist for Four Verts: An CFB 25 Substack. He also writes for The League Winners covering the Steelers and Sooners.He currently is a junior at Florida A&M University. Follow him on X and Instagram at yoitsbrandonfr.
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