Will College Ultimate Team Find Success?

The idea of Ultimate Team mode is great but other franchises too often mess it up.

Many of the college football community are dreading today, but yesterday was the reveal of the ultimate team game mode.

If you want to see the blog, you can view it here.

There’s been a lot of negative comments regarding CUT. And in all honesty, there is some reason for pessimism. In other sports, games like 2k, Madden, and FIFA, Ultimate Team has ruined many of today’s sports games with microtransactions and pay-to-win tactics.

If you aren’t aware of what ultimate team is, it’s a mode that lets you build your dream squad and take your team into matches against other members of the community or in solo singles games.

When building a team, you’re building towards a specific playstyle that represents you and how you play the best.

It’s gotten worse and worse over the years. You will only unlock cards when spending money. The missions give you account-bound C-tier cards. Then, every week, they will drop LTD (limited) cards in packs that are the best in the game at the time, and they will cost 20 bucks every week.

Even F2P is highly competitive now and not worth it. It used to be flipping playbooks and stuff at the start, but now 90% of the player base knows about it, and you’re lucky to get minimum profit off what a card costs to make.

With that being said, though, there is an advantage that the CFB ultimate team can tap into that other games can’t, which is the nostalgia factor.

As everyone knows, this game has been gone for 11 years. Many college stars have come and gone throughout that period, and they never got to be in the game. CUT is perfect for all those players we missed out on using, like Lamar, Baker, and Saquon.

I won’t play Ultimate Team as much as the other modes, but I am still excited to see what they reveal, like who the leading players are they try to sell us on. Current NFL stars like McCaffrey, Mahomes, Burrow, and Allen in the college setting are interesting, plus the greats I grew up watching, like Tebow, Newton, and Manziel. I’m curious to see the selection of players.

I love playing the solo challenges in the ultimate team. I don’t bother with online head-to-head, though.

Always try to get maximum stars on each challenge, although that’ll likely change this year.

Something about CUT that the blog went into was that I like testing out the new playbooks and schemes.

This game will vastly differ from the last iteration we played, so going through the challenges and finding

a scheme and a defensive front that works best for you will heavily translate to how you play dynasty, quick games, and online, which is fantastic.

It will give me a crash course on how each playbook operates and a launching pad on which playbooks and schemes work best for me.

Later in the year, there will be OP cards and likely cheesy plays that will be run online, but I’m willing to give the ultimate team a shot this year despite that negative connotation the mode has received (and rightfully so).

What are your thoughts on the ultimate team? Will you play it at all? Will you build an all-theme team for your favorite school? Or mix and match(which is usually the route I take)?

Brandon Scobey is a Featured Columnist for Four Verts: A College Football 25 Substack. He also writes for The League Winners covering the Pittsburgh Steelers and Oklahoma Sooners. You can follow him on X and Instagram at yoitsbrandonfr.

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