The most treasured possession in the old house in Madison was a plastic championship wrestling belt that had absolutely nothing to do with wrestling but everything to do with how, on a daily basis, it was obtained. From 2004 to 2007, San Diego State head coach Sean Lewis was a backup tight end for the Wisconsin Badgers who lived with four friends off campus. That belt was representative of earned glory, a temporary totem that any one of the housemates could hoist.
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To hold it tight in one’s grasp, one simply had to challenge the title holder to press the power button on the gaming console, choose a school and be ready to lock in for four quarters on the long-adored EA Sports NCAA Football video game franchise. Often, the victor’s jubilation was juxtaposed by the fury of the defeated.
“Oh, there were TVs that were broken and controllers that were busted,” Lewis said.
Random 20-something-year-old college students losing their minds over taking a video game L is a time-honored tradition. It isn’t specific to any game in particular. Yet for those who operated in the alternate virtual universe of college football, that pendulum of agony to ecstasy that swung like it did in Lewis’ college dwelling in Madison is only a sliver of what made the video game infatuating to those who poured countless hours into it.
Some wanted to exclusively compete against artificial intelligence in the game, scheming a way to build the most dominant program possible by out-recruiting the microchips inside their Xbox or PlayStation. Others satiated their appetite by dominating the online platforms where they could be matched up with another player somewhere around the world at any given moment.
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The past decade, however, left gamers wondering if they’d ever be able to replicate that familiar giddy feeling every mid-July when they’d go to drop $60 to buy the latest version with the latest rosters, tearing the plastic wrapping off to get to the disc as fast as humanly possible. Eleven years since EA Sports last released NCAA Football 14 in the summer of 2013, the video game company is bringing back a crucial cultural piece to college football.
EA Sports College Football 25 is out this week — fully Friday, though with a Deluxe Edition available Monday. The game is back after its uncertain future was long bandied about. Its exit came in the wake of an antitrust lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon against the NCAA and EA Sports claiming that college athletes deserve to be compensated for their name, image and likeness. In May 2014, a $40 million settlement with EA Sports was reached that would compensate as many as 100,000 former athletes $4,000 each.
Every Team is Somebody's Favorite 👏#CFB25 | 🔗: https://t.co/Ev6vq6Dcg0 pic.twitter.com/3runx2vA4W
— EASPORTSCollege (@EASPORTSCollege) June 26, 2024
So Gen X’ers, millennials and Gen Z’ers will finally have something to agree on and are guaranteed to overrun the online servers as they try to download the game as soon as they can to get their first anxious look at how it can be played all these years since its last new release.
The details are remarkably different from its predecessors. Before it vanished, NCAA Football allowed you to be an amalgamation of an athletic director/coach/player as you built your program from scratch. Now, in a shrewd sense of irony, the lawsuit that spelled its doom is a crucial part of the game with NIL playing a role in recruiting players. Then, of course, there’s the transfer portal, where gamers will be doing their best to lure prospective players to the fold.
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“I’m a believer that video games teach you things: from problem solving to managing a roster to knowing what types of recruits to go after, how to attack a defense — to me that’s all advanced learning,” said ESPN commentator and former Baylor QB Robert Griffin III, the cover athlete on NCAA Football 2013. “I’m glad the game is back because I felt like I was always in a better place as a player, not just a student of the game, learning how to conquer video games.”
The fervent following the game has maintained over the years despite its absence lies in the minutiae of the sport itself. If you’re going to really enjoy a college football video game, you better know what the hell is going on. And there’s so much to know beforehand. Arduous recruiting rules, transfer windows opening and closing, offseason workouts that can or cannot feature coaching contact. You have to know how to suffer through the customs laid out by the NCAA and how they impact your real-life fandom. That, in turn, helps you out in the game.
Before he could drive, South Florida assistant coach Jack Taylor was 15 back home in St. Louis, ready to tear into the hard copy of NCAA Football 2012 and get his first order of business out of the way: creating a playbook. Then he’d employ that playbook in the Dynasty Mode, and he’d be off virtually recruiting AI-generated players from AI-generated places across the country to best fit that style.
“On NCAA, the coaching, the picking plays, I do think that was cool to try and do it in your own image and pretend you were a big-time ball coach,” Taylor said.
In College Football 25, you won’t have to name players or randomly generate names. Players are being paid $600 a piece to appear in the game and given a free digital copy. For all those years at the height of the game, the sport’s most tantalizing athletes weren’t given their proper due.
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Reggie Bush was just No. 5 at USC.
Tim Tebow was just No. 15 at Florida.
Pat White was just No. 5 at West Virginia — and at first was a right-handed QB, which he took offense to.
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Griffin joked that his initial likeness was nothing like him when he made his debut in the game in 2007.
A group of devoted followers of the game offered enthusiasts a way to upload rosters with proper name and image on the NCAA 14 version year after year, posting links on forums on Operation Sports, a website devoted to coverage of sports video games.
“It’s not like the site, on the whole, would drive the life of it — I would say we were the campfire, we were the safe haven for people who were still really interested in the game,” said Chase Becotte, senior editor at Operation Sports. “It’s all just a meeting ground.”
Sitting around that online campfire over the years were fans from all over. Included in the mix: Griffin, the former Heisman Trophy winner.
“The kids nowadays are reaping the benefits from all the struggles we had to go through back in the day,” Griffin said. “I don’t mean as a player. I mean as a guy that’s downloading the rosters offline and having to input them into the game one by one because you want to make sure everybody has the right name.”
They’ll have the right names in College Football 25. It will help endear players from random schools everywhere to gamers who are seeking out a fleet-footed quarterback or a tackling machine cornerback to blitz off the edge. Knowing who is under the helmet is going to help spawn a new age of diamond-in-the-rough players who gamers believe deserve a better shot in real life.
“It’s going to help with the exposure and relatability with players because of connection to them through the game,” Lewis said.
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The sports gaming world has never had anything close to the popularity of NCAA Football die only to be resurrected anew. A new generation of fans is waiting to hop on the sticks, too. Lewis’ son, Rory, is 8. With the Aztecs’ preseason camp around the bend, Lewis hopes to be able to play College Football 25, but when he isn’t, he knows Rory will be putting in the necessary work.
“I’m sure my son will pick up the slack in that regard,” Lewis said.
(Top image: Courtesy of EA Sports)