They must have had retired coaches design the AI this year, because it absolutely cannot handle recruiting and he portal. Teams are dropping into the 60s after three years, multiple top-25 recruits are going unsigned, etc.

I was feeling the itch to pre-order, but now I'm strictly waiting for a sale, and that's only if they fix the above.

I wouldn't really care about the fact that making coaches progress faster is paywalled, but it's pretty clear this is just the beginning. It makes sense that they would start this type of thing with the CFB game; it's not so popular that the backlash would be deafening, but it's popular enough that they can get meaningful data on attach rates and what-not.

Everything about modern triple-A gaming is fully enshittened. Some people are hoping for GTA6 to fix everything, and I think they're going to be massively disappointed.