To acquire talented players for a new team College Football 25 To play EA Sports video games, you must be prepared to take part in activities that most adults would consider strange. Intention Press the button and it will crawl through high school students' social media. Intention Please send a direct message to that student. Intention Make an effort to get high school students interested in you and accept when they ask to meet you. Intention I find it very odd to be up past midnight doing this.
As head coach of the Sun Belt Conference's Texas State Bobcats, I spent all night trying to woo players to join my up-and-coming team in the just-released video game. And yes, those are real in-game actions. Wooing a four-star linebacker involves scouring their social media, sending them direct messages, and hopefully inviting them to take an official visit and maybe even enroll at your school.
This is the first release in the franchise since its release in July 2013, when NCAA FootballThe series was scrapped after a UCLA basketball player sued over the inclusion of his likeness in another video game, which led to a major legal defeat. NCAA Footballof The cancellations were due to game studios being unable to compensate players for their video game appearance fees under NCAA eligibility rules, but we now live in a new world with new gaming consoles and new player compensation rules for college sports. Most players in the 134-team Football Bowl Subdivision were paid $600 to appear in the game, which was released this week.
The game was beloved upon its last release, and thanks to a long hiatus, this week's release is perhaps the most eagerly awaited sports release in American video game history. The game is downright fun, and I've played it almost a full day since I got it on Monday. There are a ton of fun features, including a detailed and diverse playbook, accurate marching band songs and stadium pomp, and a (sometimes too-realistic) recruiting engine. Fans of the 134 teams will be filled with pride seeing their team's fields, uniforms, and traditions depicted in silky video game graphics. But the real fun of the game is in the CFB 25 It's about building a strong football program from the ground up.
Coaches who don't care about the well-being of their players are the worst kind of people in sports, and in this game I'm right up their alley. It's just the cost of building a great team. program.
I consider myself one of the more progressive members of the college football press corps. I have written about the corruption of the sport's economics for years. My work has been cited in congressional reports and National Labor Relations Board memoranda arguing for employee status for college athletes. I think football coaches are whiners who should stop complaining about how today's athletes make their jobs harder.
It's confession time. College Football 25 It exposed the manipulative, anti-labor beast inside me. As the leader of the digital version of Texas State, I have become everything I have claimed to want to destroy. I lie to high school players to get them to play on my team. When they are not happy with their playing time, I pretend to give them more playing time and encourage them not to transfer to other schools. Then I bench them. I encourage underperforming players to leave my team. These are the very actions I have condemned on these pages. I have a total disregard for my players' health, leaving my stars on the field even when the game tells me that the 19-year-olds are dangerously close to being injured. I am a bad person, but I have no regrets. Because it will be rewarded when I accomplish the incredible and lead the Bobcats to a national championship.
College Football 25 is a rare sports video game. It's unusual for such a beloved sports franchise, one that we've heard sold extremely well over the years, to disappear after 11 years with no replacement on the market. This is the result of the skewed economics of college sports, which had two effects. First, college football diehards are passionate about the game in a way that NFL fans aren't. Madden This is a game that this studio releases every year. The more time you spend with it, the more you love it. I know several college-aged fans who bought a current-gen console this week just to play this new game. The last version came out during the Xbox 360 era.
The economics of college sports also set this game apart. Managing a college football roster is a tough job in real life, and EA Sports had to respect that without making the game so obscene that schools and conferences wouldn't want to participate. We all know that nasty coaches around the country tend to take underachieving players off their rosters to free up scholarship spots for others. The game lets you “encourage transfers” if you sign more than the 85 allowed. (EA doesn't ask you if you want to emulate real-life coaches by insulting you, excluding you from social situations, or calling you bad baggage.) The game only lets you offer 35 scholarships, but if you decide you no longer want a player, you can simply remove him from your recruiting board to free up the offers you spent on him. (EA doesn't ask whether to issue actual “commitable” scholarship offers or fake conditional offers to players who aren't truly “prospects” for your school in real-world football terms).
The actual gameplay is similar to real life. Some players have traits that make them inherently crazy when playing in difficult away conditions. (My kicker missed a game-winning 44-yard field goal at Alabama because I couldn't stop shaking while I was aiming the kick.) You can monitor your players' health during the game with “wear and tear” monitors, and you can even make your college football players play until they break a bone and miss a few weeks, just like I did. College football coaches who don't care about their players' health are the scum of the sport. And in this game, I'm just like them. It's just the cost of building a great program.
This only works in college football, a sport that deifies coaches and treats players like they're disposable — after all, there are a lot of decent players, but only a few really good coaches, and coaches make a ton of money by finding good players, developing them further, and getting rid of the bad ones.
Gamers don't care about fake video games salary Coaches get paid CFB 25 There are many ways to satisfy a successful gamer head coach, and I have been building my skill tree to be as compelling a recruiter as Georgia's Kirby Smart or Texas' Steve Sarkisian. Stadium attendance at games fluctuates, and after losing just one game last season at Texas State, I was thrilled to watch my team's stadium slowly go from half empty to filled with proud Bobcat fans.
This style of program management is far from pleasing. My digital athletes deserve more respect than I give them, and my leadership style would be a lawsuit waiting to happen in the real world. But we all make sacrifices in the name of careerism, and if there's anything worth compromising your beliefs for, surely it's bringing national football glory to the good virtual people of San Marcos? Texas?
