Why Player Ratings Change When Starting Dynasty Mode in College Football 25

With EA releasing another roster update for College Football 25 this week with some new ratings updates included in that update, some folks might be getting that itch to restart their dynasty mode playthrough with a new team. This is understandable, but you might be confused then when you start your dynasty and notice some player ratings are different than what they are on the roster update. Here’s what’s happening.

No, you don’t have an out-of-date roster (at least it’s not likely). You can always go back to the main menu and click on the Rosters button and then click Update Rosters to make sure you have the latest roster update. From there, you need to make sure you click the Active Roster option not the Default Roster option when starting a dynasty. That said, we don’t think that’s usually the problem.

Instead, EA actually does change some of the players when you start dynasty mode. This is automatically happening and can’t fixed by you. We believe this usually happens with certain types of players, but it could be impacting even more than we realize.

The most extreme changes seem to happen with players who have been added to the game post-launch. Anyone who was not in the original rosters can get caught up in a bug that will do more extreme changes to some players. RB Kaleb Johnson (out of Iowa) was boosted to a 93 overall in this week’s roster update.

He is an Elusive Back with gold Workhorse, gold Arm Bar, silver Headfirst, and gold Downhill abilities. However, he was not in the rosters that launched with the game, he was added post-launch. Here is how he looks when you start dynasty mode.

He now has Balanced and Sidekick as physical abilities and Clearheaded, The Natural, and Road Dog as mental abilities. He’s also a Receiving Back and a 78 overall. So what happened? Well, the running theory is that players added post-launch just get their tendencies jumbled by default. Here is OS user DonkeyJote explaining the general issues:

There’s a weird glitch where anyone who was added to the game or had their position changed after launch gets their archetype changed when you start a dynasty. Kaleb Johnson wasn’t in the game at launch, and like all RBs added later, he’s changed to a Receiveing Back. Which kills his Overall, since he’s got poor receiving attributes.

Any OLBs and DEs, as another example, become Power Rushers. So if they’re a Coverage Style Linebacker, or a Speed Rusher they now have a terrible Overall at their primary position, and lose badges.

And then some players just lose badges. Dillion Gabriel has:

-Gold Sleight of Hand, Resistance, Dot, Headstrong, Fan Favorite, and Field General, plus Purple Step Up on the regular rosters.

-In Dynasty, he’s got a purple Fan Favorite, Road Dog, and Headstrong, Gold Sleight of Hand and Step Up, Silver Resistance and Dot, and Bronze Pull Down. Loses Field General entirely. And his Archetype hasn’t changed (which is, ironically, Field General).

It’s worth noting that Dillon Gabriel was in the default rosters at launch. His tendency didn’t get changed when starting dynasty mode either, but he still had badges that were shuffled around. It is unclear to me why that is happening.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to fix this either. Even if we change our own Scheme and the Head Coach itself when starting a dynasty, the players still change. And what you also need to understand is abilities change when tendencies change because Elusive Backs don’t have access to the same badges as Receiving Backs and so on. This works that way for all tendencies/archetypes. if you ever want to understand that better, just open up any athlete’s player card in dynasty mode and have a look as it will show their potential badges on the right side of the screen.

One thing to note is that while the tendencies/abilities changing is a bigger deal and is annoying, the OVR change is not usually that big of a deal. While Johnson has dropped from a 93 to 78, his raw ratings are all the same. He’s just a bad receiver so his Receiving Back tendency makes his OVR drop to a 78, but he’s still got the same impressive individual ratings.

If you want to figure out if players might be impacted by this bug, it’s a bit of a process to identify who has been added throughout the entire year. We did one massive update for the sizable September roster update where we catalogued all 850 or so players who were added. That is one resource to use, and if any players are missing a photo on their player card still, that’s usually a tell as well that they were added post-launch.

However, if you’re looking for the default rosters from launch to check against the current rosters, we’re not aware of a hub that has all that info online. It’s something we could think about cataloguing next year, but outside of setting your game to the launch default rosters (use the Default Rosters option when you start a dynasty mode to access the original rosters) and checking that against a video of the current rosters, I’m not aware of a catch-all way to know who has been added since day one. In other words, trial and error is probably going to be your best bet. Simply track the active roster before you start a dynasty, and then start a dynasty and see if anyone on the team went through massive changes before deciding if that’s going to bother you enough to not want to be that team anymore.