After 6 months of building a Dynasty mode companion app, it's ready to share. Curious what you'd want added before CFB 27
Like a lot of you, I have mixed feelings about CFB 26. I love college football. And while I have played the game religiously since last July, I constantly feel like something is missing. The depth wasn't there. And the challenge — even with house rules — never felt right. I'd win national championships in year 2 with a 3★ program and shrug, because nothing in the game made the management side of running a college football program actually hard.
So I started tracking everything in an Excel spreadsheet. Three goals when I started:
- Immersion + depth the game doesn't give you.
- Real stat tracking beyond what the in-game UI lets you see
- A challenge that comes from realism, not house rules — where even a powerhouse like Ohio State or Alabama would have to strategize to win every year, because real programs do
I realized pretty quickly that a spreadsheet was not going to give me what I wanted. So, I began building an app and have been doing so for the last 6 months. It runs alongside the game — you play CFB exactly how you always have, the app sits on top tracking the program-management layer the game ignores.
Original plan was to ship it earlier this year for CFB 26, but every time I sat down to call it "done" I'd run into another feature the dynasty experience was begging for, and I'd build it (even built a halfway decent radio call-in show that automatically generated after your game completed but costs are going to be astronomical for the voice generation so not looking likely to be included - let me know in the comments if you want to discuss price for the feature to be added).
Long story short, as the app continued to grow, I made the call to hold the release until CFB 27 drops in a couple months. There'll obviously be tweaks once we see what's new in the game itself, but waiting also means the launch lands when the community's actually fired up about Dynasty mode again instead of late in the CFB 26 cycle. It also gives me time to gauge interest on this and hear any ideas you may have.
The pieces I think the community will appreciate most:
- Every FBS roster is seeded with real players. And every player, both on the roster and subsequent recruits, has individual NIL economics/motivations — ratings, position scarcity, personality, family/agent pressure, competition tolerance (how they react to other guys at their position), coach loyalty. They're not interchangeable cap hits; they're individuals with demands. It will be up to you on how you balance these demands with your bankroll and what tough decisions you make on roster management along the way. This is the real transfer portal we need.
- A Full Coaching Staff with Player Connections. Build out a full coaching staff (not just OC/DC). Each coach recruits specific players. Those players develop bonds with those coaches. At end-of-season salary negotiations, those coaches remind you who they signed and what their market value is. Lowball them and they walk — and the recruits they brought in may follow them out the door.
- Fanbases that act like real fanbases. Ohio State fans aren't happy with 10-2 and a loss to Michigan. Alabama fans aren't happy with anything short of a playoff run. The bar scales with prestige + tradition, the way it does in real life. A 3-loss season at a blue blood after years of dominance is firing-coach-thread territory. The defaults are intentionally harsh. As your success on the field increases, the fanbase expectations follow and the demands create constant pressure for perfection. Certain fans will ride with you through thick and thin. The bandwagon fans will be looking for the next big thing and will jump ship almost immediately when things get difficult - and with them goes their NIL money.
- Boosters with personalities. Real cash flows in from them, but with strings. Use your NIL Collective to develop relationships with Boosters to generate the necessary funds to support your program. But, Boosters don't give their money away for free. They have favorite players, favorite coaches, and opinions about your scheme. Win and they're quiet donors. Lose, or ignore them, and they get loud — and the money dries up right when you need it for recruiting.
- Effortless stat import. Honestly, this is probably the feature I am proudest of. After months of testing and tweaking, I beleive I have cracked the code on screenshot imports. For Xbox users, link your OneDrive account to the app once. From there, just take screenshots in-game like you normally would — top 25, conference standings, box scores, player stats, game stats, awards. OneDrive auto-syncs them to the app, the app's AI runs OCR + parsing on every one, and the data lands in a clean reviewable view. When you're done playing, you open the app, hit Approve (or edit if anything looks off), and everything saves to your dynasty. No manual typing, no juggling spreadsheets. (PlayStation users can drag-drop the same screenshots in — same parser, no auto-sync - Playstation doesnt allow API connection)
- Generated media coverage. When you mark a week complete, the app writes a recap article about your game and your dynasty. No two articles are the same. It recaps the game, discusses the season as a whole, and takes a look at future matchups.
There are a ton of other features that I am excited to share with you but, for now, I just wanted to send this introductory post. I'm a solo dev, this is a side project, and I'm sharing now to start the conversation with the people who'd actually use it.
What I'd love your input on:
- What's missing from this list that you'd want in your dynasty?
- Which feature above resonates most — what should I lead with going into CFB 27?
- What kind of management depth do you wish CFB 26/27 had that I should consider building in?
Happy to answer anything about how it works. Please join the waitlist here: