An Alabama player salutes a touchdown as two people play the new EA Sports College Football 25 video game at the McDonald Hughes Center in Tuscaloosa.

After the success of last year's revival, EA Sports' College Football 26 is set to release on July 10.

Details are slowly beginning to trickle out about the game, but on the business side, Cllect's Matt Liberman dropped something of a bombshell on Friday. In this year's release, schools will be compensated directly in the form of royalties depending on how often players use them in-game.

While it's not exactly clear how EA Sports is quantifying that, it seems to be based on the total number of games played with each team.

Directly tying payouts to gamers' usage puts at least a little bit of power in the hands of the player, and if there's one thing we know about hardcore college football fans, it's that their pettiness knows no bounds.

This system seems primed to be weaponized by fans. Here are just a few possible ways they might be able to do it.

Boycotting rivals

If you're anything like me, the first thing you're going to do when you boot up the game for the first time is start into a "play now" match with your favorite team in one of its highly anticipated rivalry games in the upcoming season. Would the rival school receiving compensation for it complicate things, however?

Fans don't often get the chance to hit their most hated teams where it hurts (financially speaking), but now they do — albeit at the margins. Will an Auburn fan think twice about recreating the Iron Bowl in College Football 26, knowing that Alabama would directly benefit from it? Perhaps not, but it's worth considering.

Payback against the SEC

For nearly two decades now, the SEC has widely been viewed as the most dominant conference in college football, and the perception of preferential treatment toward the league has certainly rubbed practically every other fan base the wrong way.

Well, now you, dear reader, have the chance to stick it to not just the conference but Greg Sankey himself by refusing to play with any SEC teams. Enjoy it. Savor it.

Will enough SEC haters coalesce to put a noticeable dent in the league's coffers? Unlikely. But moderately annoying Sankey is absolutely on the table.

Only playing as Group of Five programs

While we're at it, the Big Ten and Tony Petitti often skate by in these conversations, but the conference is right there with the SEC every step of the way these days. After all, both are pushing for a model where each league would receive four automatic bids to the College Football Playoff.

Wouldn't you like to get some payback? Well, now you can by refusing to play as any teams from the two most powerful conferences. And why stop there? Why not just ignore the Power Four entirely?

Group of Five teams are more fun to play as in dynasty mode, anyway, and if you've yet to play a night game in Laramie, Wyoming, in College Football 25, I highly recommend.

Strategically simming dynasty matchups

While players control the matchups in the play now and online modes, the same cannot be said for dynasty mode or Road to Glory, where conference schedules are generated automatically and are uneditable. There is a workaround, though: Just sim the games against the schools you are trying to punish financially.

Sure, that may make those modes slightly less fun. But knowing you're robbing your most despised institutions of those precious cents in royalties is all the reward you'll need.

Starting and immediately exiting games

While it's admittedly not yet clear exactly which metrics EA will base its payouts on, it seems to focus more on games played than time spent with the team. It doesn't take a wild imagination to see how this system would be ripe for abuse.

If you're trying to bolster your school's payout, you could very easily start a game and immediately exit before repeating until you get bored. Even if EA required a game to be completed, nothing is stopping you from starting up a CPU vs. CPU game and walking away.

It's even conceivable that a more enterprising fan could rig up a bot to automatically play the games and take the human tedium out of the process entirely. That may seem far-fetched to you, but you should never underestimate how petty college football fans are willing to get.

You've been warned, EA Sports.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: 5 petty ways fans can weaponize EA Sports usage payouts in College Football 26

Reporting by Tyler Nettuno, For The Win / For The Win

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect