For the past year, the Madden team has watched as EA Sports College Football outperformed it in this key way

Madden NFL 26's Best Feature Is Something It Learned From College Football 25

For the past year, the Madden team has watched as EA Sports College Football outperformed it in this key way

EA Tiburon's Isaac Etheridge, also known as "Spade" from his days as a Madden content creator, spoke at length about the changes players can expect, specifically based on player feedback. He led with game speed, signaling just how much the team understands this was an area it had to focus on. "We believe the NFL is the home of the fastest, most explosive players on the planet, right?So we knew something had to change. We started to validate this, both internally and externally," Etheridge said, explaining how the team used a prospective build of a faster Madden to test its favorability with players.

"We took a build of Madden 25--a special build with different locomotion--and we sent that out, and we asked people some very direct questions: 'Do you feel like you have more control? Is this more fun?' We validated this, and we realized our players want more control. They want more speed. They want that explosion. It was an easy decision to make."

Etheridge explained that Madden 26 doesn't precisely port over College Football 25's exact locomotion. Instead, it features a merging of "the best tuning sets" from both the Madden and College Football 25 locomotion systems. "We don't want you to play one game and say, 'Okay, this feels fast,' and play another game and go, 'What happened? Same [player] ratings--what happened? Why is this guy not as fast?' So we put both games on parity with a new locomotion set that we believe is the best for both types."

Soon after Etheridge spoke, I got to play Madden 26 for the first time, and I could see what he meant. It's not exactly like College Football 25, which still feels looser and faster overall, but Madden 26 surely feels closer. Madden 25 was, in my estimation, the first "slow" Madden since Madden 22, with 21, 23, and 24 all feeling faster in recent years. As you can probably infer (if you don't already know personally), the Madden game speed problem has long been a frustrating variable. Some games feel right, others don't, but consistency was elusive. You couldn't get used to how Madden felt because that feeling wasn't long for this world. However, it now seems that player feedback has been overwhelmingly in favor of a faster football game, leading the Madden team to adopt this style well into the future.

Players like Xavier Worthy will feel more dangerous in Madden 26 thanks to its new locomotion system.

My hope is that the re-emergence of College Football as an annual series helps guide the Madden team to more wise decisions like this one. A faster Madden is a better Madden. As Etheridge said when presenting to me and a room of roughly 50 other sports nerds, "a 4.2 [40-yard dash time] should feel like a 4.2." That's true at any level, and it's good to see the Madden team has seemingly figured that out for good this time.

Madden 26 is faster, but I'm no longer worried about that attribute being a fleeting high note before it slows down considerably again in Madden 27 or 28. As long as college football continues to earn more money, notch higher review scores, and total more hours played than Madden, it will likely dictate, or at least strongly suggest, the direction of Madden in some key ways. Madden will continue to have plenty of ways to differentiate itself from its brandmate, but in this way, it's wise to play catch-up.

For more on this year's NFL, check out how Madden 26 feels on Switch 2 and how the game was overhauled for one special player.

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