Why 'College Football '25' means so much to its long-suffering fans

It's impossible to overstate the love and nostalgia for the NCAA Football video games. EA Sports is bringing them back with College Football '25, and the excitement is palpable.

To tell you the story of EA Sports' NCAA Football, I need to tell you the story of Ingle Martin.

You'd be forgiven if you were unaware of Martin, a University of Florida quarterback who flamed out before transferring and setting records at the tiny liberal arts school Furman University. He's not much of a household name. You might think Ingle Martin sounds like a South Carolina accountant, or you might assume I'm talking about the loss adjustment firm — whatever that is — that nearly shares his name.

But in my house, Martin is a legend. Or, at least, an unnamed digital avatar of Martin is a legend.

My childhood pal and next-door neighbor, confident in his NCAA Football abilities, once rushed for 1,000 yards in a single game with Martin against me. It was an all-time performance, an unbelievable feat of speed option that nearly broke my young brain. I will never forget that journeyman quarterback's name.

That was the magic of what is largely considered the finest sports video game franchise in history. With more than 100 Division 1 football rosters, a Dynasty Mode that could reshape a university's athletic program, and its unique gameplay, the possibilities of the game were endless. It was the closest a sports video game came to being open-world, where you have near-infinite options in shaping the narrative of a team. It was a place where Ingle Martin could be a household name.

Then, the game disappeared for 10 years. "There was this feeling that this thing had been taken from us," Rodger Sherman, a sportswriter formerly at The Ringer who just spent last season chronicling a 62-game college football road trip, told Mashable. "It's strange; it kind of acquired mythical status."

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Reigniting a fandom

So why would EA Sports shelve a popular franchise that defined an entire genre of gameplay? For legal reasons, of course. NCAA Football was killed off after its 2014 edition because of a high-profile legal case that found the game was using players' likenesses without compensation. At the time, NCAA rules forbade players from making money off their name, image, or likeness (otherwise known as NIL) to maintain their amateur status while the NCAA, universities, and EA raked in cash hand over fist. NCAA rules have changed over the last 10 years, allowing players to be compensated for NIL endorsements. (Though college players still don't receive an outright salary.)

Now, EA's College Football '25 is set to drop on July 19, roughly a decade after its last iteration. Folks who pre-ordered a deluxe edition of the game or have an EA Play membership will get early access on Monday, July 15. A long-rumored dream, College Football '25 has built the sort of online momentum typically reserved for cultural monoliths like Barbenheimer and Succession.

For a certain kind of person — typically speaking, a sports-enjoying dude born between 1985 and 2000 — this is the most highly anticipated media in ages. I hardly play video games, and I cannot wait.

Kevin Clark, an ESPN personality and host of This Is Football for the Mannings' production company, is about as eager as a person can be for this game. He even used precious airtime on ESPN to petition for the release date to be a national holiday.

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"The game went away a decade ago, and in that decade, I've gotten married, advanced quite a bit in my career, had a child, bought a house, and I am only half-joking when I say all of these things were made possible because I wasn't playing the video game," Clark told Mashable over the phone. "Sometimes I'm like, 'What if they just made the game for the past decade?' What exactly would I be doing, and would the trade-off have been worth it?"

In truth, there's no telling which timeline is more rewarding. "I'd be living in a studio somewhere in Middle America, but I'd be in Year 49 of my Miami Dynasty," Clark joked. "And we'd have something rolling, you know?"

The issue with the game or its potential pitfall is a symptom of that imagined world. We have only the memory of NCAA Football. And it existed in a much different time — both in the real and gaming worlds. Lots has changed. Chiefly, micro-transactions and online gaming exist now.

But as a great philosopher of our time and UT's Minister of Culture, Matthew McConaughey, once said: "Sometimes you gotta go back to actually move forward."

Building a world

If you're wondering if College Football '25 will mirror the halcyon days of NCAA Football, all indications are yes. The folks who got an early look at the game have almost universally said it's very good. And, even more importantly, it understands what the game should be.

In short, it's not a reskinned version of Madden. The folks who loved the NCAA franchise loved it for its expansiveness inside the game, specifically in Dynasty Mode, where you'd control every aspect of a university's football program. You could play at 130-some colleges. You could turn a tiny school in places like North Texas or Tulsa into a powerhouse through countless seasons of recruiting computer-generated studs. A slow drip of stories and reporting, such as a recent episode of ESPN Daily, revealed that Dynasty Mode and authenticity were the focus of the game's re-creation — things like making sure the water fountains at Arkansas State, of all places, were rendered just right.

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The NCAA Football series existed back when online gaming wasn't a thing. Without that worry, it was the best sports game on the market. Many folks, myself included, were worried EA would take College Football down the same path as EA's Madden NFL series, which has devolved into a frustrating offline product over the last decade. It seems to skew toward younger players and incentivizes spending extra money on Ultimate Team microtransactions. As an offline gamer molded by NCAA, I had to adjust settings endlessly to get anything worth playing in Madden's offline Franchise mode. It took a lot of Reddit research to stop the computer model from permanently benching my best players. The team behind College Football '25 has seemingly understood it couldn't fall into the same trap.

It's a game that will get long-retired gamers back into the fold. The last thing you want to do is have a game not for the people who remember the magic of creating a new reality for their favorite college team. That's why the game was so great in the first place.

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College Football '25 should benefit from the fact that it's more fun to recruit from an endless pool of talent from 130-some schools rather than being tied to just 32 NFL teams and a limited number of players.

"The NFL is a closed system where you're dealing with only NFL players. The transactional part of college [football] is always going to be more fun because of how almost open-world it is," Clark said.

He added: "There are thousands of players, in theory, available to you, and you can filter by speed. You can filter by state. You can filter by: 'We just want the biggest guys on the planet. We want the fattest five guys on Earth to play offensive line for us.' And it's all realistic... There are gems like that all the time."

The idea that the game is what you make it — it's your world to create and expand — is a lost art in sports games.

"That's why I think people love it so much," Sherman said. "It allows you to bend reality."

Pre-game jitters

There is no overstating the excitement surrounding the release of this game, especially in the sports world. Clark mentioned that "one of the top TV personalities" in sports got in touch with him about gauging interest in starting a 32-team online Dynasty, and some of the most famous names in football —huge NFL players — were down to do it.

"The energy is pretty palpable," he said. "I don't think I've seen anything like this where everybody's excited."

"I have not come into anybody my age, who's a guy, or even within 10 years of me who's like, 'Oh, I'm not an NCAA guy," Clark added. "Everybody's got a story."

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Mine is Ingle Martin. Clark's was Jordan Futch, a University of Miami recruit who struggled during Clark's time at the school. But in Clark's Dynasty, Futch was the guy who had a game-winning interception against Wisconsin in the national championship. He remembers the exact play: the Wisconsin quarterback threw a cross-body pass over the middle that Futch picked up and took to the house.

"If I saw or met Jordan Futch now, I would be so happy," Clark said. "I would just be like, 'Oh my god, you have no idea what you did for me.'"

What other video game creates nostalgia like that? Clark and I are not alone. Sherman, a Northwestern grad, recalled building the lowly Wildcats into something great via computer-generated recruits.

"I got the Heisman Trophy for this fullback that I recruited; his last name was Lovelady. It was auto-generated, his name was like, Steve Lovelady or something," Sherman said. "And I would just run passes to the fullback over and over and over again. And yeah, I built Northwestern up into a national champion."

For years, we were in a desert without the game. Sure, you could dig up a 2014 NCAA Football game. You could even play a modded version that dedicated fans continually updated throughout the years. In 2020, uber-popular Barstool personality Big Cat briefly enthralled the sports world by streaming his Dynasty mode while we waited for real sports to return. But none of this scratched the specific itch of playing a modern version of the game.

Talk with a dude who loved NCAA Football, and they've got something akin to pre-game jitters. We're bouncing off the walls. Sherman and I expressed how we'd have to buy a new console to play the game because it will be available only on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The internet is just as hyped for it. One viral post and its replies focused on what you would do the first playback. A classic triple option? Four verts? Take a knee to honor the years without the game? It's wild how much of that game stuck with those who played it.

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That's far from the only viral post about College Football '25. It's ramping up further as we approach the release date. People have joked about the older generation schooling the kids on this game — or, at least, the kids not understanding how good they have it. We used to Google players' numbers, figure out the person's real name, and manually change it if we wanted accuracy. There are jokes about how people will run their team in Dynasty mode. There was a trend of people farming likes on TikTok to get their significant others to buy them the game.

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For the people who loved this game, we get something huge back. This week the nostalgia can recede; instead, we can re-enter that world and drop an avatar into our favorite university.

"The thing about college football is people feel such a strong connection to the place and the school and its traditions," Sherman said. "It feels like you grow up in that stadium."

Sherman wasn't certain what team he'd use in his first foray with College Football '25, but Clark was dead set and eager to run it back with The U, his alma mater. He plans to practice the game's mechanics via Practice Mode before jumping directly into a Miami Dynasty.

"I'm gonna go headfirst into [University of Florida's] The Swamp, which is Miami's real opener," Clark said. He knows his exact play-call.

"I gotta take that deep shot, play one in The Swamp. Play action," he said. "And then we'll all be whole again."