CFB27 Real Coach Importer

A small Windows tool that fixes the generic / missing head coaches in an EA Sports College Football 27 dynasty save. It gives each affected coach their real name, their real in-game likeness (3D head + portrait, using the game's own coach art), and their real-life historic career record — all as a pure save edit. No game files are modified; your original save is never touched.

On a fresh CFB27 roster, EA ships most head coaches as real, correct likenesses, but leaves a handful as generic placeholders — for example Deion Sanders, Kirk Ferentz, Mario Cristobal, Bill Belichick, Bronco Mendenhall, Blake Anderson. This tool detects those and restores them.

Download & use (no install)

1. Download CFB27-Real-Coaches.zip from the latest release.
2. Unzip it anywhere.
3. Make sure CFB27 is closed, then double-click Real-Coaches.exe.
4. Pick your dynasty save from the list (or paste a path).
5. Load the newly created <yoursave>-REALCOACHES copy in CFB27.

Node.js is not required — the .exe is self-contained. Keep the files that ship next to it (coaches.json, schema\, runtime\) in the same folder; the tool reads them at startup.

Options

Open a Command Prompt in the unzipped folder to pass flags:

Real-Coaches.exe                 pick your save, then correct a COPY
Real-Coaches.exe --dry-run       audit only — show what would change, write nothing
Real-Coaches.exe --names-only    rename + face only; skip historic stats
Real-Coaches.exe --skip-my-coach leave the coach YOU control untouched
Real-Coaches.exe --json          machine-readable audit
Real-Coaches.exe "C:\path\to\DYNASTY-MYSAVE"

By default the tool corrects every generic coach, including the one you control — so if you're playing as a made-up coach at one of the seven teams below, you get the real name, face, and career record too. Add --skip-my-coach to leave your own coach exactly as-is (handy mid-dynasty, so your win-loss record isn't replaced).

With no path given, it auto-detects your saves folder at Documents\EA SPORTS College Football 27\saves (including a OneDrive-redirected Documents), lists your dynasty saves, and lets you pick one by number.

What it does

1. Checks the save's head coach at each of the seven known teams (below) against who's really coaching there.
2. For any of those seven that's generic/wrong and has a real likeness in the game, sets the correct name + face.
3. For those corrected coaches only, writes their real age, seasons with team, and career record (wins/losses, bowls, conference titles, national titles) — because a replaced generic inherited the placeholder's made-up age/tenure and empty 0-0 record. Coaches EA already ships correctly are left untouched; the game already gives them their real data, so there's nothing to fix.
4. Saves everything to a new copy named <yoursave>-REALCOACHES. Your original save is never touched — load the copy in the game.

The game schema is auto-selected to match the game build each save was written by. Schemas for both the current (August 2026) patch and earlier builds ship in the zip, so saves from either era work with no manual setup — you never need to swap a schema file in yourself.

Coaches actually imported

EA ships a fresh CFB27 roster with real, correct coaches for almost every FBS team already — the tool only needs to replace the handful shipped as generic placeholders. This is the full list of that correction:

Team	Placeholder replaced with	Real likeness	Age	Seasons w/ team	Career record
Colorado	Deion Sanders	Yes	59	3	16–21
Iowa	Kirk Ferentz	Yes	71	27	213–128
Miami	Mario Cristobal	Yes	55	4	97–79
North Carolina	Bill Belichick	Yes	74	1	4–8 (college only)
North Texas	Neal Brown	No — no shipped likeness, name only	46	0	72–51
Southern Miss	Blake Anderson	Yes	57	0	74–54
Utah State	Bronco Mendenhall	Yes	60	1	146–95

These seven are the only coaches ever changed. Everyone else on the roster is already correct as EA shipped them — name, face, and career stats — and is left untouched.

Career records are college head-coaching records (the game only tracks college coaching). Bill Belichick's is his 2025 UNC record, not his NFL career.

Editing the coach data

coaches.json sits next to the .exe and is plain, editable JSON. Open it in Notepad to add or change a coach, save, and re-run the tool — no rebuild needed.

Safety notes

• Writes a copy, never your original. Load the -REALCOACHES file in-game.
• Your own coach is corrected too, by default (name + face + real record). Use --skip-my-coach to leave it untouched. Heads-up: editing a coach has crashed the in-game Edit Coach screen, so avoid that screen on your own coach afterward — or use --skip-my-coach. Sidelines and menus are fine.
• The name + face swap is confirmed working in-game. The historic-stat write has not been fully game-tested yet — if a save misbehaves, re-run with --names-only for the proven-safe path.
• One coach (Neal Brown) has no likeness shipped in the game — see Coaches actually imported — so he gets the correct name but keeps a generic face. Some replaced coaches also have no career-stat slot in the save, so their record can't be attached (the audit labels these stats-ref empty). Confirmed by inspecting a real save: these coaches' Coach.CareerStats reference is genuinely all-zero (no row assigned), not a parsing gap on our end — Age/SeasonsWithTeam are unaffected since those live directly on the Coach record, not behind this reference.
  • Allocating a fresh stats row (v2, not built): the underlying franchise table format supports this — empty rows form a real linked free-list (table.header.nextRecordToUse + per-record next-pointers), and the madden-franchise library already has safe unempty/relink logic for it (used elsewhere for table3 overflow records), so it's a supported operation, not a binary hack. What's missing: this tool opens saves with autoUnempty: false (deliberately, so tables it merely reads aren't mutated as a side effect), so claiming a specific row needs a scoped unempty rather than a global one, and — more importantly — nobody has verified in-game that CFB27 is happy with a coach whose career-stats row goes from absent to populated mid-save. Tracked as a known gap in the sibling CFB27-Dynasty-Engine project's REAL_COACHES.md design doc. Low risk to prototype (writes only ever land in the disposable -REALCOACHES copy), but not implemented here until validated.

Building from source (developers)

Requires Node.js 20+.

npm install
npm start                        run against a save (same flags as above)
node index.js --dry-run          audit only
npm run build-exe                produce build\dist\CFB27-Real-Coaches.zip

npm run build-exe bundles a Node runtime into a single Windows .exe (via @yao-pkg/pkg) and assembles the distributable folder + zip. It preflights first — validating coaches.json and loading every bundled schema — so a broken asset fails the build rather than a user's run.

Schemas & game patches

Every save records the game build that wrote it, and the tool picks a bundled schema to match. Two ship in schema\:

Bundled schema	Covers saves declaring
CFB27_472_0.gz	the release build and the July 2026 patch (809, 814)
CFB27_833_0.gz	the August 2026 patch (833) and later

Selection is: exact filename match on the declared version, else the newest bundled schema whose version is at or below what the save declares.

That "at or below" rule matters, and it is not just tidiness. Through the July 2026 patch the CFB27 table layouts really were stable across builds, so simply using the newest schema was safe. The August 2026 patch ended that. The Coach table — this tool's entire subject — changed layout, and the mismatch breaks in both directions: the old schema reads zero named coach fields on a new save, and the new schema reads zero named coach fields on an old save (the parser silently falls back to generic Field_N names rather than erroring). So a pre-patch save must keep resolving to 472 even though 833 is newer. Both directions are verified against real saves of each era: 493 named coaches read on both, and 0 when the schemas are deliberately crossed.

A future patch (say 840) resolves to 833 automatically until a newer schema is bundled — no code change. If you ever need to force a specific schema, drop a CFB27_<major>_<minor>.gz (or C27_<major>_<minor>.gz) file into schema\ next to the exe; name it for the save-declared build number, which is a different counter from the version reported inside the schema file itself.

Regenerating the dataset (optional)

coaches.json is generated from two hand-curated sources — GENERIC_FILLS in build-dataset.mjs (which real coach + likeness belongs at each generic school) and stats-source.json (their cited college career records). No game save is needed:

node build-dataset.mjs

Edit either source and re-run to regenerate coaches.json.

Credits & disclaimer

Built on the madden-franchise save library. This is an unofficial fan tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by EA Sports. Use at your own risk; always keep backups of your saves.