With the NFL 2K franchise seemingly dead, the biggest competition Madden NFL has is EA's own College Football series. They'll share some of the innovations each team comes up with it, but this addition to Madden may be a controversial one.
Madden NFL 26 will implement College Football's Wear and Tear system, affecting player performance after multiple collisions with other players. On one level, it makes sense. An athlete logically shouldn't be as fresh as he was at the game's start in the ninth minute of overtime. But it was taxing to look at your player's late game ratings and see significant penalities to his speed, agility, and ball carrying.
The feature clearly needs some work though. I know I leave my starting running back in with multiple stat penalties and haven't had a single player get injured in a game yet. This is a cool, realistic thing EA's trying to do, but it doesn't feel like it's there yet. Right now, this feature is looking a candidate to be a big deal that is promoted in games for a couple of years than suddenly vanishes never to be mentioned again. In-game momentum!(coff coff)
The good news is that both Madden NFL and College Football 26 will feature more dynamic substitution options. We only get a limited amount of timeouts and game pausing opportunities, so Wear and Tear felt like more of a pain to deal with than an actual important thing that made the game more realistic.
In franchise mode, the best trainers will have abilities to counteract Wear and Tear's effect. The ability Workhorse helped individual players weather the effects, and I'm assuming we'll get a similar ability this year. App Trigger will keep you posted.