College Football 27 Guide: Earn Skill Points, Respec, and Upgrade Cards
College Football 27 adds a new way to grow your roster: Skill Points. Certain players can be leveled up using this currency, and each upgrade rolls random stat boosts for the card you’re investing in. You can pay for Skill Points with real money, but you can also earn them for free—and you can even respec to reclaim spent points.
Quick facts: Skill Points and upgrades
- Skill Points are used to upgrade player cards with random stat boosts.
- Skill Points can be purchased with real money, but they can also be earned for free.
- You can respec your spent Skill Points to refund them.
- Each upgradeable card has its own separate pool of Skill Points (not shared like Coins).
- You can earn Skill Points via challenges, exchanges, or buying
- When upgrading, you pay Skill Points step-by-step and the boosted attributes are random.
Some quarterbacks are built to sprint through the line or escape pressure, so they’re often among the most effective rushers on the field. If you’re chasing that “fast QB” playstyle, there’s also a list of the 10 quickest quarterbacks in College Football 27.
For card upgrades, look for an Upgrade tab after selecting an upgradeable card. If you want to find everything you can upgrade quickly, open your Item Binder, choose Quality, then switch the filter to Upgradeable. That filter shows every card eligible for Skill Point upgrades.
Skill Points are card-exclusive
Skill Points don’t work like Coins. They aren’t a single universal pool you can freely spend anywhere. Each upgradeable card has its own unique stack of Skill Points, meaning points earned or bought for one card can’t be used on another.
If you swap to a different card, its Skill Point count starts at zero, since you haven’t earned or purchased points for that specific item yet. This restriction also applies to Skill Points you receive through exchanges.
Because Skill Points are tied to cards, each item also has a limit on how many Skill Points you can build. For example, a card that can be upgraded three times may cap how many Skill Points you can earn for it, while another item might allow far more—one card example in the system supports up to 28 Skill Points.
In total, there are three ways to get Skill Points:
- Complete in-game challenges to earn them for free.
- Exchange other cards to earn Skill Points for your target card.
- Buy them using Points, which are equivalent to real cash.
Earning Skill Points for free via challenges
Not every upgradeable card offers the free challenge path. Some cards currently don’t include that option. To check, open the Upgrade tab on your player card—if you see an “Earn” prompt, that’s where the challenge set will live.
Challenges are time-limited. If you don’t complete them while they’re available, they expire after a period of time. That means you can’t necessarily finish everything for a card in a single day; you’ll need to wait for new challenges and collect points over time.
There’s an exception: Spotlight-style cards come with their challenges immediately available once you obtain the card. Still, the overall challenge schedule can make free upgrading feel slower than expected—especially when a specific objective is hard to complete.
Challenge types vary by position. Some tasks are straightforward, like playing a match using that player card in your lineup. Others are more specific—for instance, earning a set amount of yardage with that card if it’s a Wide Receiver.
Because of the time pressure and sometimes-fussy requirements, the free method can take longer than you’d hope. Combining challenges with exchanges can help speed things up, since exchanges let you target Skill Points more directly.
Earning Skill Points through exchange
Exchange is often the more efficient way to build Skill Points because you can trade away other players to receive Skill Points for the card you actually want to upgrade. One major advantage is that BND cards can be exchanged for Skill Points, giving you a way to cut loose items that won’t help your lineup.
However, exchange isn’t universal—not every card accepts player items for exchange. For Season 1 cards specifically, the system limits what you can trade in: they only accept Skill Point Token cards, which are obtained by spending Season Trophies.
For now, each Skill Point Token card costs 900 Season Trophy, and trading it in yields 4 Skill Points. The action can be repeated. It’s functional, though it would be even better if player-item exchange and token exchange were both available on the same cards.
To purchase Skill Point Tokens, head to the store and switch to the Season 1 section. You’ll be able to see everything you can buy with Season Trophies. You can purchase as many tokens as you want, but remember these token cards are only usable on Season 1 items—so you’ll want to avoid overspending.
When you exchange a player item for Skill Points, the conversion amount depends on both the player’s OVR and rarity. For example, trading a Rare player rated 82 can return up to 18 Skill Points, which is a strong deal if that 82-rated card doesn’t fit your lineup.
Lower-rated players convert for much less. An Uncommon player rated 75 may only net you 1 Skill Point, so exchange values can vary wildly depending on what you’re willing to give up.
Buying Skill Points with CFB Points
The third option is purchasing Skill Points using real money, shown in-game as CFB Points. The pricing is:
- 20 Skill Points — 500 CFB Points (about $5)
- 10 Skill Points — 250 CFB Points (about $2.50)
- 4 Skill Points — 100 CFB Points (about $1)
Just like the other methods, you’ll want to buy Skill Points through the card you plan to upgrade. The game does not let you move Skill Points to a different card afterward.
Once you have Skill Points, the upgrade itself is done from the player card. Open the Attributes menu inside the Upgrade tab. That screen shows the maximum OVR your card can reach, and each upgrade step costs a different amount of Skill Points—with the cost increasing exponentially as you progress.
You can also see the total Skill Point cost to max out the upgrade path in the top-right corner of the Attributes menu.
The random upgrade “lottery” and respec cost
There’s a catch: you don’t see exactly which attributes will improve at each step ahead of time. Upgrades are fully random. You spend Skill Points for one step, then the game reveals which stats were boosted.
If you respec and try again, you may get different results. In practice, you can repeat this process until you land the outcome you want, but it comes with a price.
Not only is the stat choice random, but the number of boosted stats per step can also vary. One attempt might boost only a single stat by a large amount, while another attempt could boost five different stats. Even the total number of boosts you receive is part of the randomness.
To respec the Skill Points you’ve already spent on a card, use R3 / RS in the Attributes menu for that card. For every Skill Point refunded, you must pay 1,050 Coins. Also, respec doesn’t happen one step at a time—all upgrade steps are reverted in a single action.
So if you upgraded a card three times and you like the first two outcomes but dislike the third, respec will undo all three upgrades. You won’t be able to roll back only the final step.
Overall, the new upgrade system behaves like a slot machine that consumes your Coins. Players chasing specific outcomes—like Wide Receivers wanting Speed—may end up respeccing repeatedly until the stat boosts align with their preferences. The difficult part is that there’s no publicly shared info about the drop rate for each stat boost.
Even though you can earn a lot of Coins by simply playing, it’s still a crucial resource in Ultimate Team, and gambling it away on upgrades isn’t risk-free. That’s why the system isn’t perfect despite giving players more control through respec.
