EA Sports surprisingly restores faith in what makes college football special | Oller
I am not what you would call a connoisseur of video games. True, I was around for Pong – Google it, kids – and was decent at Mattel's handheld electronic football, but my children cleaned my clock at Mario Kart. And anything else developed this century.
Honestly, I probably lost interest in video gaming back in the day, when minutes turned to hours while waiting for Ohio State basketball players Ron Stokes and Troy Taylor to finish slaying the arcade version of Space Invaders in OSU's Baker Hall dormitory. (Aside: Stokes and Taylor turned out well, but I'll always wonder how deep the Buckeyes could have gone into March if their two starting guards could shoot the rock as well as they shot electronic aliens. jk).
But I digress.
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Somewhere along the line I began eye-rolling sports video gaming, not so much because it ate up time – we spent hours playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, and I went through a video golf phase, so it would be hypocritical to point fingers now – but because it was sports without the sweat. I know, I know. Loosen up, dude. It's just an entertainment outlet.
Regardless, I began to blame companies such as EA Sports for attempting to synthesize the real thing, especially at the college level, by creating more sterile versions of actual performance. These video companies didn't really care about the traditions and pageantry of college football. They were acting in their best interests, further inflaming the corporate greed that already threatened to professionalize amateur sports.
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It may be naive to think Brutus Buckeye , "Hang On Sloopy" and the O-H-I-O stadium chant actually help set college football apart from the NFL, but amateur athletics are all about naivety as a form of escapism. Or maybe a better way to frame it is that Saturdays in the Horseshoe are about more than football. The game-day experience matters, too. The sights and sounds stir emotions, from anticipating the band and team ramp entrances to what color uniforms the Buckeyes wear.
To that end, I have done a 180 flip on EA Sports, or maybe a 90-degree turn since I was never rock bottom down on the company to begin with. What happened? Since 2013, when EA stopped making its College Football game, largely due to legal action against the company, college football has corporatized itself without help from EA.
Turns out EA was less of a guilty party in the monetizing and professionalizing of college sports than were college presidents, athletic directors, conference commissioners, lawyers, TV networks and the athletes themselves.
Name, image and likeness, the transfer portal , pay-for-play and conference realignment have changed college football for better and worse. Better: Athletes have gained power, where before they were pawns. Worse: take your pick. There's plenty to choose from. The professionalization of the game will continue in the way of advertising patches on jerseys, stadium naming rights – the DSW Shoe? – even as selected non-revenue sports will see funding cuts due to the proposed legal settlement that instructs universities to spend up to $22 million on paying athletes.
Eyeing only those changes, it is easy to forget that college football is not the NFL. But EA Sports, of all things, is bringing the "college" back to the college game. How? I'll address that in a moment, but first I do not mean for this to come off as free advertising for the July 19 release of EA Sports College Football 25 , which is a more detailed reboot of the original game. Instead, consider EA a conduit by which my faith has been restored, that the finer points of what makes college football special are receiving attention and consideration.
In other words, EA is simply the messenger to deliver the good news that college football is more than million-dollar coaching salaries, geographically-challenged conference realignment and payment of players under the guise of volunteerism.
To wit: EA has invested time and money into getting the game-day experience just right for all 134 schools represented. EA declined an interview request, due to "bandwidth as we ramp up to launch in less than two weeks," but the company's website details what can be expected.
Under the heading of "Iconic Atmospheres," EA outlines how the game will include team run-outs, rivalry rituals, synchronized crowd chants, fight songs, mascots and stadium simulation. Some of this was available in 2013, but not to this extent.
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As senior game designer Christian Brandt described it online, "Picture this, you are playing as Penn State getting ready to take on your opponent. This all starts with your team running out of the tunnel to 'Zombie Nation' blasting and the whole stadium chanting, 'We Are Penn State.' "
Brandt graduated from PSU, but those who have previewed the game say Ohio State fans can look forward to TBDBITL performing "Script Ohio." No word on who dots the "i."
EA Sports is savvy enough to know that including atmosphere and pageantry will help sell its product, so don't buy into all the marketing malarkey they're selling. Still, when stowing my cynicism for a minute, it says something when a billion-dollar company appreciates the college game-day experience enough to spend millions on getting the little things right. Because, collectively, those little things add up to a big thing.
I wondered a few weeks ago in this space why fans would pay big bucks for an increasingly professionalized college football product when the on-field talent is inferior to the NFL. All things being equal, fans gravitate toward wanting to watch the best. The answer, which feels increasingly strained, is because college still centers on tradition, whether that means alumni returning to their alma mater, marching bands playing the same fight songs they have for decades or a victory bell tolling in the distance.
I needed catharsis, and a video game company provided some. Go figure. But needing more, I turned to the crown prince of college football: Archie Griffin . Mr. Double Heisman understands that tradition, pageantry and stadium atmosphere matter in college football because they distinguish it from the pros.
"They are the foundation of its uniqueness and popularity," Griffin said. "Tradition includes the important historical and consistent practices that represent the values of both the school and the fans. Tradition is built over time and cannot be bought."
It can be purchased. See EA Sports. But you catch Arch's drift.
"Pageantry is the celebration and highlighting of those traditions, while atmosphere is the pure, raw excitement for both traditions and the game itself," he added.
That sums it up perfectly. Pay-for-play, NIL and players transferring so often you need a scoresheet to keep track can distract us from the core ingredients of college football. But thankfully there remains strong sentiment that the game relies on those foundational pillars. I just never expected that a video game would help hammer that home.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: EA Sport restores faith in what makes college football special
