To recruit good players in the new College Football 25 video game from EA Sports, you must be willing to engage in activities most adults would find odd. You will press a button to scour the social media of a high schooler. You will send a direct message to that high schooler. You will try to make that high schooler interested enough in you that they will accept when you offer to book them a visit to see you. Your significant other will think it’s extremely weird that you stay up doing this until well after midnight.
As the head coach of the Sun Belt Conference’s Texas State Bobcats, I spent the night courting players to join my nascent juggernaut in the just-released video game. And, yes, those are real actions in the game: To woo a four-star linebacker, you can research their social media, send them DMs, and hopefully get them to take an official visit so that they might commit to your school.
It is the franchise’s first release since July 2013, when it went by the name NCAA Football. The series disappeared after a UCLA basketball player sued over the inclusion of his likeness in a different video game. This led to a major legal defeat and NCAA Football’s cancellation, since the game studio could not compensate players for their appearance in video games under NCAA eligibility rules. But we live in a new world now, with fresh gaming consoles and fresh player compensation rules in college sports. The vast majority of players in the 134-team Football Bowl Subdivision received $600 payments to appear in the game, which came out this week.
In its last iteration, this was a beloved game. The long layoff made this week’s release perhaps the most anticipated sports drop in American video game history. The game is indeed a blast, and I have logged nearly a full day’s worth of playtime since getting it on Monday. It has many fun features like detailed, diverse playbooks, accurate marching band songs and stadium pageantry, and a (sometimes way too real) recruiting engine. Fans of all 134 teams can be filled with pride when they see their teams’ fields, uniforms, and traditions depicted in silky video game graphics. But the real joy of CFB 25 lies in building a powerhouse football program from the ground up.
I consider myself one of the more progressive members of the college football press corps. I have written for years about the rot in the sport’s economics. My work has been cited in congressional reports and in a National Labor Relations Board memorandum that advocated for employee status for college athletes. I think football coaches are whiners who ought to stop pissing and moaning about how today’s athletes have made their jobs so difficult.
Confession time, then: College Football 25 has laid bare a manipulative, anti-labor beast within me. As the leader of digital Texas State, I am everything I have claimed I want to destroy. I lie to high school athletes to get them to play for my team. When they are dissatisfied with their playing time, I pretend I will give them more, urging them not to transfer to another school. Then I keep them stapled to the bench. I also urge bad players to scram from my program, which is just the kind of behavior I’ve called out in these very pages. I show complete disregard for my players’ health, keeping my stars on the field even when the game informs me that my 19-year-old players are dangerously close to getting injured. I am a bad person, and I do not regret it, because it will pay off when I complete the unthinkable and lead my Bobcats to a national championship.
College Football 25 is an unusual sports video game. There’s no analog for such a beloved sports franchise—one that sold very well, I’ve been told over the years—to simply vanish for 11 years without any sort of replacement entering the market. That was a result of college sports’ warped economics, and it had two effects. One, it left college football obsessives lusting after the game in a way NFL fans do not lust after the Madden games that this same studio releases year after year. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I know several college fans who bought the latest-generation gaming consoles this week just so that they could play the new game. The last version came out in the days of the Xbox 360.
Those same college sports economics also make the game unlike anything else. Managing a college football roster is nasty work in real life, and EA Sports had to honor that without making such a salacious game that schools and conferences wouldn’t want to be in it. Everyone knows that asshole coaches all over the country are prone to pushing underachieving players off their rosters to open up scholarship slots for other players. In the game, you can “encourage transfers” if you’ve signed more than the 85 allowed players. (EA does not ask you if you want to mimic a real-life coach by cussing a player out, excluding him from social settings, or referring to him as a lousy piece of luggage.) In the game, you can offer only 35 scholarships, but if you decide you no longer want a player, you can simply remove him from your recruiting board and free up the offer you’d spent on him. (EA does not ask if you want to issue real “committable” scholarship offers or fake conditional offers to players who aren’t truly “a take” for your school, in real-world football parlance.)
Actual gameplay nods to real life, too. Some players have traits that will essentially make them a headcase if they’re playing in a difficult road environment. (My kicker missed a game-winning 44-yard field goal at Alabama because he could not stop shaking as I lined up the kick.) You can monitor your players’ health during the game via a “wear and tear” monitor, and if you are like me, you can force your college football players to play right up until the point of a broken bone that will knock them out of action for weeks. College football coaches who don’t look out for their players’ well-being are the scum of the sport—and in this game, I am exactly like them. That’s just the cost of building a great program.
This would only work in college football, a sport that deifies coaches and treats players as expendable. After all, there are lots of decent players out there, but there are only a few truly great coaches. The coaches make the big money because they find the good players, develop more of them, and run off the bad players.
Gamers don’t care about the fake video game salary their coach gets paid, but CFB 25 has different ways of making a successful gamer head coach feel good. I’ve been building up my skill tree so that I can become just as persuasive a recruiter as Georgia’s Kirby Smart or Texas’ Steve Sarkisian. Stadium attendance in the game is dynamic, so I felt great joy when I lost just one game last season at Texas State and gradually saw my team’s stadium go from half-empty to full of proud Bobcat faithful.
This style of program management is nothing to relish. My digital athletes deserve more respect than I give them, and my leadership style would, in the real world, be a lawsuit waiting to happen. But we all make sacrifices in the name of careerism. And if there’s one thing worth compromising one’s principles over, why shouldn’t it be bringing national football glory to the good virtual people of San Marcos, Texas?
