In the last three weeks, video game maker EA Sports has been strategically releasing news about its new college football game.
There hasn’t been a game for a decade because litigation made it impossible to continue as it had been going, where EA would essentially put the current players in each year but without naming them to try to skirt legal rights issues. By the end of the original run, they had the announcers record all the names so that by merely entering the correct names into the game (or acquiring a roster file from the Internet with all of them) you could hear all the right names in calls.
It was a thinly veiled ploy and everyone knew it. The NCAA first pulled its license with EA, and later the SEC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 did too for fear of further lawsuits about player likenesses. EA had licenses for the schools’ logos and so was going to make new versions of the game without mention of the NCAA, but the lack of major conferences was too much. After the 2014 edition, the game was canceled.
The game can come back now that we’re in the NIL era, and so players both get their names in the game from the start and get a small payment and a free copy. Some players opted not to participate, Arch Manning being the most prominent, but the vast majority of guys out there will be in it.
I never owned a game system that could play the games, as it was mainly a PlayStation and Xbox title. I have been a Nintendo partisan since childhood, and while a stripped down version of the game was available for the Nintendo Wii in 2009, I never bothered with it because it wasn’t the full game. I played it a handful of times while visiting with my brother on his PlayStations, but it was very rare that I ever partook.
So why am I devoting a newsletter to a game I never played and still won’t, because for technical reasons that aren’t super interesting the Nintendo Switch won’t get it?
Because the game is a love letter to college football from people who genuinely care about the sport.
The EA Sports studio that made and now again makes the college football game is in Orlando. It either was or is technically in Winter Park, but a recent group of journalists who got a preview of the thing all said they went to Orlando, so maybe it got moved.
Anyway, there have always been a lot of Gators and UCF Knights on the staff. They are true die hards. They spend an inordinate amount of time to get all the details correct. They scan stadiums and jerseys. They record band performances from sheet music provided by schools. The pore over hand gestures, fan color coordination schemes in the stands, and idiosyncratic customs.
If you haven’t at least watched the trailer, I encourage you to do so. Florida is featured a couple times, including near the beginning, so you’ll get a quick Gator fix.
There are some things that will stick out. Yes, you’ll get Notre Dame and Michigan and more Georgia and Alabama than you’d prefer.
Yet, it opens not with a traditional powerhouse but the blue turf in Boise. Wyoming is featured several times, and App State is in there playing the Cowboys. Boston College and Syracuse get more screen time than FSU and Miami do. We see Army in the flexbone. Illinois hoists the Illibuck, the turtle-shaped rivalry trophy they share with Ohio State. Iowa players wave to the kids in the children’s hospital that overlooks Kinnick Stadium. A drum major does a flip, a live steer readies to charge the field, and a fuzzy humanoid duck rides a motorcycle.
It’s a cornucopia of the things that make college football great, and that separate it from the sterile, corporate atmosphere of the NFL.
No, Boise State and Wyoming won’t ever play for national titles. But so what? They’re a part of the fabric of the sport. Their fans care. They add distinctiveness you’ll never get on Sundays.
The game developers at EA understand it. They feel it in their bones. It’s plain as day that they care more about the sport of college football — the whole of the thing — than the people who actually run the sport.
Greg Sankey is almost the last college sports lifer at a position of real leadership, and even he has his limits. He doesn’t look out for the sport overall because that’s not his job. It’s no one’s job, actually, which is why it always feels like college sports lurches haphazardly from one thing to the next.
College football has to get more professionalized because there got to be too much money in it to fly under the radar with amateurism as cover. When football coaches make eight figures, and non-revenue sport coaches make seven figures, and TV contracts reach past the $1 billion mark, it’s not plausible anymore to claim it’s all for the love of the game. And besides, amateurism is incompatible with antitrust law when there are real revenues coming in.
We’re in a weird in-between state where the old college football we’ve known all our lives is not quite dead, but the coming superconference/superleague format is not yet here. Unfortunately the latter looks inevitable, as TV and entertainment executives infiltrate the sport with perhaps private equity not far behind.
It’s easy to despair, but ultimately college football goes on because there’s nothing better than Saturdays in the fall. And whether you play it or not, the EA College Football game is a good reminder of that fact, and that you’re not alone in loving everything that makes the college level something truly special.