EA is just releasing a deluge of official blogs, this one in particular being the Draft Champions blog. I won't steal all their thunder as you can read about it at your leisure, but here's the general point:
Having identified the challenges, we asked ourselves “What is the core fun of Fantasy Football that will work for Madden?” It is pretty obvious: Making the pick. Choosing the player that is going to carry your team. Draft night is the best part of Fantasy Football. The goal of Draft Champions was giving players draft night over and over again.
Our Take: At the end of the day, it's a middle-ground between Ultimate Team and doing a full-on Fantasy Draft like you would at the start of your Connected Franchise mode. It seems to be a very light time commitment in the grand scheme of things, which seems to be the aim. I think it personally speaks to those people who like the idea of Ultimate Team but don't like the grind. Or on another level, those that like Ultimate Team but more like just changing out their players all the time.
You go through 15 rounds and can upgrade a base team that is pre-drafted for you. The players you choose from each time will be random, so there's no guessing how many chances you will get to take an upgraded QB and so on. This is especially important because it's not like a regular fantasy draft where the best players go in Round 1 and you're picking up scraps by Round 15. Instead, it will rise and fall throughout the draft.
At the end, in the "solo" version you try to win three games in a row against better and better CPU teams -- one loss knocks you out. If you play a multiplayer version, it appears you're trying to win four games in a row without losing. If you do lose, your team vanishes and you draft again. I would assume here that by winning the "championship" would gain you more in-game currency that can be used in Ultimate Team -- but that's just a guess.
Source: Madden NFL 16 Feature Deep Dive: Draft Champions (EA Sports)
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