EA Sports College Football 25: Wear and tear feature, explained

EA Sports College Football 25 challenges players to pick their spots and protect their players from taking big hits at all costs. Here is everything you need to know about the wear and tear feature and how to best avoid injuries.

Wear and tear is a new feature in EA Sports College Football 25, which accurately tracks the impact of every hit and fall on your players. For example, if your quarterback throws the ball 40 times in a game and takes a few shots from sitting in the pocket for too long, he won’t operate at 100 percent the following week. Or, if a running back takes a huge shot to his knee or lower leg, they won’t have the same explosiveness on the following set of plays.

Thankfully, there is a way to mitigate wear and tear and prevent your best players from taking unnecessary damage that might potentially keep them off the field when they’re needed most. Lets jump right into how this feature works.

How does wear and tear work in EA Sports College Football 25?

As seen in the image above, every limb and body part of a player is linked to a different color indicator. Yellow is slight, high is orange, and severe is red. Based on the hits or fatigue from that body part, the color will change, and a meter in the bottom left indicates how close a player is to becoming injured. Fortunately, their body parts will degrade slower based on the toughness rating, and players can regain health when they are not on the field, during timeouts, at halftime, and between weeks.

To avoid injuries, users should regularly make substitutions to provide rest and prevent wear and tear. In addition, it’s always more fun to make an exciting spin move, juke, or hurdle over defenders, but you don’t always want to put your players in dangerous positions. So even though it’s not as flashy, sometimes running out of bounds or doing a safe catch might save your team for later in the season.

How to check wear and tear

Here is a list of ways to check wear and tear in EA Sports College Football 25.

• Player reticle – Left side Wear and Tear bars, right side fatigue. Note, the bars depleting only represent the most hurt body part.  
• Depth chart – Here, you can see a Wear and Tear panel on the bottom right of the player card as well as the total an attribute is decreasing in the spreadsheet. 
• Coach Vision – Hold LT+RS on Xbox or L2+R2 on PlayStation down to see the Wear and Tear status of your entire team. 
• Picture in Picture (PIP) in the play call menu. 
• We’ve added a ton of ‘Wear and Tear’ get-up animations. After a player is banged up, you’ll see a variety of animations for a given body part, depending on the severity.
• You can also manage your players’ Wear and Tear in the Dynasty player card.