The wait for College Football 25 ends: Don’t ruin it, EA

After 11 years, college football is making a return to video game systems.

The NCAA Football video game franchise launched in 1990 and became a super popular sports simulation series. It showed all the grandeur of college football traditions and doubled as a testing ground for advanced features we’d later see in Madden. EA Sports controversially discontinued it in 2013. Now, to please the fans, it’s bringing it back.

EA Sports released a teaser trailer in February to officially announce College Football 25, a re-branded version of its college football series. The trailer showed off the Rose Bowl and a few models being created for the game, and finally, it teased a summer release date. As someone who played NCAA Football 2014 for more hours than I should probably admit, I had to learn everything about the new game. Here’s what’s known so far.

The original NCAA Football series came to an end with NCAA Football 14 — mostly due to an antitrust lawsuit that alleged the NCAA was misusing the images of college football players, by not paying them to appear in the game.

In the years since the antitrust case, public opinion has turned against the NCAA, leading to players being able to capitalize on using their name, image, and likeness — something they weren’t allowed to do a decade ago.

This has led to players now being able to make money from advertising deals, and so EA can currently pay the players for their inclusion in the game. EA is reportedly offered a pool of about $5 million for players to appear in College Football 25, which works out to about $500 per player on average.

There are still some kinks to be worked out, but NCAA Football returning with College Football 25 is great news for video game and college football fans alike. But the 11 years without new games has college football fans’ imaginations running wild, clamoring for features that might not be able to end up in the game.

EA Sports’ recent track record with its other football franchise, Madden, has also annoyed fans. There are increased microtransactions and few new features that make buying the annual Madden updates worth it.

Still, college football fans have been waiting for the return of NCAA Football for a decade, and there’s nothing EA could do that could take away excitement for this game. EA Sports is building College Football 25 using the same engine it uses on Madden, and a lot of the original NCAA Football development team are returning to work on it.

EA Sports

Every FBS-level team featured

It sounds unlikely that every FBS (“football bowl subdivision”) college football team will be included in the game.

247Sports reported that EA reached out to 118 of the 134 schools with a Division 1 FBS football team, and some of them didn’t agree to be in the game. Here’s a list of the schools confirmed to be featured in the game:

1. Alabama Crimson Tide
2. Florida Gators
3. Texas A&M Aggies
4. Texas Longhorns
5. Oklahoma Sooners
6. Oregon Ducks
7. Virginia Cavaliers
8. Notre Dame Fighting Irish
9. Michigan State Spartans
10. Michigan Wolverines
11. Nebraska Cornhuskers
12. Ohio State Buckeyes
13. Penn State Nittany Lions
14. Purdue Boilermakers

If your favorite team isn’t listed here, don’t panic. Other major brands like the Miami Hurricanes, Florida State Seminoles, USC Trojans, and Clemson Tigers have worked with EA Sports to have those teams included in recent versions of Madden, so we’d assume those teams are safe bets to be included in the game as well.

Any team not in the game will be at a recruiting disadvantage to the schools featured in the game, so you can rest assured that the top schools will be in College Football 25. We’d be shocked if most schools didn’t eventually agree.

Best parts of NCAA 14, with new features

Game modes

All the fan-favorite game modes are slated to return with College Football 25. There will be Dynasty and Road To Glory game modes, which let players take control of a coach or player, respectively. There’s also slated to be mascot games, so you play football games with entire teams composed of mascots.

There’s also going to be a college football version of Madden’s Ultimate Team feature, which lets you build your own teams of current and classic players.

Player names

Classic NCAA Football fans will also love that they won’t have to manually type in players’ names. As part of the workaround EA used to create the original NCAA Football games, players weren’t allowed to use athletes’ names, although you could go in and type out the entire roster yourself. For instance, Caleb Williams, the presumptive No. 1 draft pick for this year’s draft, would’ve been in the game as QB #13 for USC, unless you manually changed it.

The game will also feature a new 12-team playoff format, which NCAA college football is actually adopting. This is cool because NCAA Football 14 came out a year before any playoff at all was adopted in college football. That makes College Football 25 the first college football game to include the playoffs.

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Is EA going to ruin this?

In the immortal words of Lee Corso, I do think it’s worth just calming down a little about this game.

In all the excitement surrounding college football’s return to video games, it seems people have forgotten what has happened to the Madden series in the decade since NCAA Football went away. EA Sports has a monopoly on NFL video games, which has led to one of the best franchises in sports games falling off a cliff.

Madden games have been getting worse reviews due to rising microtransactions, few-to-no new features or game modes, and ridiculous bugs that pop up around the game’s release each year.

This isn’t to say a re-skinned version of Madden wouldn’t make college football fans happy, considering what we’ve gotten from the video game world in the last decade. But we should probably not get our hopes up for the game. I’m preparing for a ton of microtransactions, which honestly suck the fun out of Madden.

EA Sports is teasing a summer release for College Football 25. We’d bet on it coming out sometime in July, ahead of the fall season. The last ten versions of NCAA Football all released in July.

EA’s teaser shows some of the game, and it promised a full reveal for College Football 25 is coming in May. Expect a lot more information about the game to drip out over the coming months.