For those ready to buy College Football 26 coins and dive into Dynasty mode, you need to know why auto progression may currently outperform manual progression, despite what you might expect. After months of testing and community feedback, it has become clear that the manual progression system has a major bug causing skill points earned during the regular season to be drastically suppressed, especially if you run manual progression with any percentage penalty activated.

Whenever manual progression is used with a 25% XP penalty—which many leagues default to for balance reasons—players effectively gain almost no skill points during the season. Simulated games result in fractional or zero skill point gains per player, even if coaching and development packages are maxed out. This breaks the floor and ceiling growth balance and unfairly hampers your players’ year-to-year improvement.

On the other hand, auto progression mode sidesteps this bug entirely, allowing players to gain far more skill points during the regular season—sometimes five times or more than manual progression. Although auto progression randomly allocates skill points without user control, the sheer volume of XP made available leads to significantly higher player development speed.

The takeaway? Unless you want to painfully stagnate your Dynasty roster, the best strategy is to keep auto progression on during the regular season and then change to manual for offseason growth and fine-tuning. This maximizes your players’ skill points earned while still giving you control where it matters most.

Additionally, active gameplay contributes further to skill point gains that are not fully reflected in pure simulations, making the combination of auto progression plus playing games the most reliable way to grow star players fast.

The community hopes that EA patches this glaring progression bug soon, but until then, auto progression is simply the smarter, less frustrating choice to get the most growth when you buy College Football 26 coins and invest your time in Dynasty mode.

If your league is stuck on manual progression with penalties enabled, you may fall significantly behind others who run auto, creating an imbalance that’s tough to overcome mid-season or mid-dynasty.

In short, auto progression offers much better returns despite its lack of customization, while manual progression currently suffers under a severe in-season penalty glitch that stifles your players’ development.

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