Football Coach: College Dynasty video game

EA Sports says their video game, EA Sports College Football, is coming to console systems in the summer of 2024. In college football’s every changing landscape regarding players as possible employees of the school, potential unionization of athletes, and NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) deals I’ll see it to believe it.

If you don’t want to invest in the latest editions of a Playstation or XBOX, there is a “manager” style solution to your college football needs- Football Coach: College Dynasty (Football Coach).

Football Coach is available on Steam for $10. While the game is only available for Windows currently, it’s supposed to be release for Mac and Linux in May of ‘23.

I decided to sit down and play Football Coach while bored at work (benchmark testing days while trapped in a room with one student that sleeps for all three hours) and it’s not only fun, it’s an addicting kind of fun that keeps me coming back to my work PC.

If you’re a fan of Out of the Park (OOTP) Baseball you’ll enjoy Football Coach. It’s not as detailed as OOTP (no licensing deal, yet), but it’s a single person developer on a brand new game (released in December of 2022). The developer is making changes every month and there’s real potential for Football Coach to become a hit.

While the team names, players and coaches names are all fictional- if you want to upload the real rosters there are was to do so via the community. The user interface is fairly simple, and in-game play calling is fairly easy.

With many of us over 30 years of age on this site, we have to admit our reflexes are far past peaking (22 years old) and maybe sitting down for a more RPG style game is the way to go.

In Football Coach, you can take over as either the Athletic Director or the Head Coach. I have only tried the head coach mode and had a lot of fun messing around with it. The playbooks aren’t as deep as someone obsessed with scheme might want (me) but the developer has been adding playbooks, formations and plays since inception.

You can get as deep into recruiting and coaching trees and talents as you want to. There are certainly elements of EA’s NCAA Football ‘14 wrinkled in. Clearly if you’re someone that wants to sit down on the sticks and play-play a football game like NCAA or Madden then this is not for you. You don’t throw the touchdowns, you pick the plays and let the fellas do the work.

For those of us that only play video games when we’re bored at work stuck in a pointless meeting then it’s perfect for you to lose 30 hours just messing around in recruiting and building your offensive and defensive playbooks.

For a few years on SOTU the summer rite of passage was to determine which current Miami Hurricanes would’ve been the impact players if EA’s version was released this off-season. I used to look forward to the July 4th release date like a second holiday of sorts. In college, everyone was back home and once you picked it up it was time to play against former teammates with our favorite teams.

Without the EA game, Football Coach has been a solid substitute for me to get my college football fix in without having to be tethered to my home console. Nice weather outside? Chill outside and play a little Football Coach while drinking beers and smoking a cigar on the deck with S.G. Goodman playing in the background.

For ‘Canes fans we can now take over the program and run it the way we’d want to. You know my ego likes seeing my name as the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes.