There are a few titles that sports gamers hold higher than other games, and these unique titles stand out for one reason or another. Usually, a specific title or specific years within a larger franchise stands out, as not all Madden, FIFA, or MLB The Show titles are equal. But when it comes to NCAA College Football, recently rebranded to EA College Football, the year of the game takes a back seat to the overall franchise, a rarity in the sporting game world. There are a collection of reasons for this and we’re going to explore a couple in a new BSO series called The Games That Defined Our Lives (TGTDOL).
The premise is simple and the execution is even simpler. We’re discussing the games that defined our childhood and young adult lives and what set them apart from other titles. Given the fact that it’s coming back after an ELEVEN(!!!) year absence due to morality and name, image, and likeness issues shelving the series until Congress approved legislation that effectively gave college athletes rights they should have had their entire lives. Now players actually get paid to appear in the game and schools feel better about participating on all levels, including clear audio of chants, traditions, the band, and even the color guard for many schools, resulting in the most complete experience fans will ever get to enjoy. It’s slated for release on July 16th, 2024.
The reason college football was more beloved than Madden came down to the reasons that make college football better than the NFL: pageantry, historic rivalries, adaptability, and the ability to create something different every year as opposed to winning a title, signing the best free agents, rinse, and repeat year after year after year. In college football, the players you sign and the type of offense or defense you create around these players are often just as important as the players themselves. Just like real life, some players prefer to play in a system they know and trust rather than subject themselves to an entirely new process that may not favor their abilities.
While Madden players would find these offensive adjustments to be tedious, frustrating, and counter-productive, EA College Football players see it as an opportunity to experiment with something new. Let’s say you’d been running a spread offense with a big-armed talent, but he decides to turn pro and your top recruit favors running a Power I and occasionally sprinkling in triple-option aspects. You can either embrace this new offense or you can try to force them into a different style of play with varying results. Some players can make the transition, but other players will struggle and fail to turn the corner. Either way, no two seasons ever play the same.
We don’t yet know how recruiting and classwork matters in this installment, but there have also been years where you literally had to take finals and do schoolwork that required real-world knowledge of topics. This was introduced in NCAA ‘07 and it remains my favorite addition to the franchise in its entire history. When selecting your nightly activity, if you selected study, you would be given a fact about one of your classes and this fact might later appear on a test in the form of a multiple-choice question. If your GPA slipped too low, you’d be suspended and held out from games and practices.
The game also provided your player with on-campus goals to meet that would increase their popularity and provide you with in-game bonuses for meeting the goals. These included athletic goals, practice goals, formation goals, and even things like academic goals and popularity goals all in the hopes of becoming a Campus Legend. It all added to the overall ambiance that the game provided, really setting it apart from any other sports title. These are things you simply couldn’t replicate in Madden or FIFA.
Rosters were another passion project in EA College Football/NCAA. Keeping up with NFL rosters is easy enough as there are only 32 teams and every transaction is largely reported and easy to follow. In the world of college football, there are over 130 teams and they all have 85-man rosters, making this process a lot more complicated and problematic, but that never even came close to stopping the roster-makers of EA College Football. The minute a transfer went down, you could count on someone having released a new update with the player on their new team. This player’s stats and portfolio would be incredibly accurate and representative of their actual abilities.
Managing an 85-man roster with depth at each spot while actively recruiting players to come in and play one of those 85 spots is a balancing act that a Wallenda brother could appreciate it. It’s no small feat to convince a top recruit to come to a school where he’s going to have to compete with four other top talents for a spot at quarterback. We’ve also been assured the Transfer Portal is going to be an integral part of the game and gamers can be sure one or two of their players are suddenly going to initiate a transfer at the worst possible time.
When I was in college, I would probably spend more time studying for NCAA ‘07 classes and finals than I did for any of my classes and finals. I genuinely had notebooks upon notebooks tracking my recruits, calls, visits, and promises. I took National Signing Day as seriously as any school and made it the focal point of my week. For me, it was imperative I signed the players I needed to enact the offense I’d wanted to experiment with that fall. If you think I took it too far, my roommate took it even further using spreadsheets and running probabilities.
I think a lot of us have similar memories when it comes to NCAA Football. I know I am far from the only person to prioritize NCAA Football ‘07’s make-believe classes over my real ones. Do you have any hilarious and over-the-top memories from playing this franchise? We would love to hear them and may even share some of the best ones in a future column. I fully plan to spend as much time playing this game over Call of Duty and hope that the over-the-top compulsion comes right back.
NCAA Football is a franchise that defined many lives and it’s exciting that the game is coming back to define a new generation of lives. Whether it’s NCAA Football or EA College Football is immaterial. What matters is that the game retains its heart and spirit. From everything we’ve seen thus far, July 19th is going to be a special day for fans, I will see you on the sticks.