Over the last decade, I fell out of love with college football. I grew up in Miami during the latest heyday of The U, and loved the variety and passion that comes with the sport throughout my teenage years and early 20s, but that ended sometime around 2014. I could say that it had to do with concerns about player safety, or the horrid way that the NCAA treated athletes; it also probably had something to do with the fact that Miami stopped being good. If I'm being honest with myself and with you, though, I can admit that a huge part of why I no longer followed the sport is that there wasn't a new college football video game for 11 years.
As a self-proclaimed capital-G Gamer, sports video games are the easiest route for me to stay invested. That is doubly true for a sport as expansive as college football, with its hundreds of schools and thousands of players. If I enjoy playing with a particular player or a particular school, I am more likely to follow their non-virtual version as a fan from a distance. (This is why I have a soft spot for the Utah Utes, for example.) In the time since NCAA Football 14 released in the summer of 2013, I have lost that easy connection, and it's made it much harder to follow college football at all. I have fired that game up in the intervening 11 years, downloading community-created rosters of the most recent seasons and even trying a couple of Dynasty rebuilds. Hell, the Defector Twitch channel was host to Heisman-winning quarterback Dee Fector, the large and doofy lad who led the University of Minnesota to its first national title since 1960.
It wasn't the same, though. Video games have advanced since 2013, and the combination of decade-old graphics and a game that was released the year before the emergence of the modern College Football Playoff made for a stilted and sometimes actively uncanny experience. It was college football, but it wasn't College Football. That changed last week, though, when the long-awaited College Football 25 finally hit the open field. EA Sports has lost almost all of its public goodwill in the years between releases—blame Ultimate Team modes across all of its games; these modes exist to part a fool with his money, and they are very successful—but I, and millions of others, were not just willing but eager to believe the hype that this would be the game we had been waiting for.
Is it? Well, it is a new college football game. And yes, the graphics are gorgeous, among the best in any game I've played and certainly the best for any sports game. But almost immediately upon loading the game up for its early access period last Monday—I had waited 11 years, so I was more than willing to pay $30 so I wouldn't have to wait one more week—I realized two things that have made my time in CFB 25 less than the sum of the parts of its hype. First, I realized that I was about to be humbled beyond my wildest beliefs as a gamer. Second, I realized that while 11 years was a long time, it maybe wasn't enough for this specific edition of the game. And yet: I have put 38 hours into the game over that week, and I wouldn't say I regret any of it.
Let's get the humbling out of the way early. CFB 25 is hard. It is really hard. I joked with a friend that it is the Sekiro of sports video games, and in the same way that FromSoftware game made me realize that I actually wasn't as good at action games as I thought, CFB 25 has revealed that a decade away from having to read defenses and make the correct play calls and all the other things that make a person good at football games had primed me for a rude awakening. I used to not just play but dominate NCAA Football 14, at my usual All-American difficulty level and sometimes even on Heisman, the game's hardest challenge. I figured CFB 25 would be much of the same, even if I did expect a bit of a learning curve.
What I got was less a learning curve and more a Learning Piano Dropped On Me From A Great Height. The game is difficult in many of the same ways that real football is difficult, which is good. I learned quickly that the computer opponent is ruthless and, thanks to "Adaptive AI"—a marketing term that manifests as the game learning your tendencies and punishing you for sticking to them—it will make you feel stupid for thinking you have figured it out. My quarterbacks across a variety of teams have had precious little time in the pocket before it collapses, but that's not quite so unrealistic; most QBs in real life have to get rid of the ball in less than three seconds or face a sack. On the other end of the field, defense requires playbook knowledge and acumen as well as real in-the-moment skill, as tackling and pass defense are both fraught endeavors. No longer is it good enough to just play man-to-man defense and blitz every now and then. Now, a player needs to mask coverage shells, time zone blitzes perfectly, cover the middle of the field with a linebacker who might not have enough speed for the job, and generally do all of the extremely difficult things that have made football such an offense-dominated sport at every level.
I understand that it looks like I am complaining about the difficulty and the fact that I had to bump myself down to Varsity level—the game's "normal" difficulty, but one I've long seen below my status—after just a few games, but this challenge was great, and has kept the game fun for me even when I was getting my ass handed to me. Sure, some of the AI's plays, especially on offense and doubly on third downs, feel like cheating, or just like the computer players know my plays ahead of time. But any time I have scored a touchdown or held firm on defense with a key stop, I have felt the same joy I did over my previous years of playing football games. More so, if I'm being honest; beating Wisconsin on the road as UTEP in a Dynasty mode, thanks to a fumble recovery touchdown and a blocked extra point, was a rush I had forgotten, and those moments have played out here and there throughout my week with the game. However, CFB 25 has definitely beaten me up more than I have it, and I'm not proud to admit that it has soured me somewhat on the game to know that no opponent, not even the generic FCS teams whose in-game rampages you might have seen throughout social media, is a gimme anymore.
Still, that difficulty is fixable with slider settings that allow adjustments for basically every facet of the field, and the CFB 25 community is working hard and fast on creating the perfect set to balance challenge with realism. "It's hard" isn't the reason that this release has not fully paid off those 11 years of waiting. If anything, even after more than a decade, CFB 25 feels rushed. The game, in its current state, was released as a buggy, underwhelming, and ultimately empty mess. I'll say here that the game hasn't been worked on for 11 years; that gap had more to do with the Ed O'Bannon lawsuit around player pay, and it was only when NIL was fully introduced into the college football landscape that CFB 25 started to take shape. The game itself began development in 2021. Still, though, in a culture of sports video games where every series releases a new game every single year, development has stagnated industry-wide, and given that CFB 25 had a three-year window for its creation, I was hopeful that it would be not just good, but polished.
It's not. Here are some of the issues I, and many others, have found:
- The simulation engine in Dynasty mode is unbelievably broken: Top teams like Georgia and Ohio State are losing to FCS schools left and right, 7-5 teams are ranked in the top 10, Charlotte wins the national title way more often than it should in year one, and somehow only about two or three running backs nationwide run for 1,000 yards or more.
- Recruiting was reworked entirely since the last game, and the result is both fun and a buggy apocalypse. Players are locked out of scheduling campus visits with recruits for no reason, names simply disappear at times from the recruiting pool, one-star schools could get five-star players with relative ease (this has mostly been patched since release, but remains worth noting), and the interface is both un-intuitive and slow.
- Online servers have been touch-and-go since release, as is true for any big game these days, and many features are locked up for no apparent reason. As an example, the game allows you to create a school from the ground up, but you can only use it online. Why? No one knows.
- While the game is tough, it goes beyond that into broken territory as a result of certain glitches, Players sometimes just do not follow the playcall, even at home, when there's no home field advantage working against the player. Defenders also simply do not move at times; my defensive end frequently just stood there after the snap.
And these are just the bugs that people have found and reported, or that I have experienced myself. I'm also disappointed in how shallow the two marquee modes, Dynasty and Road to Glory—where you control one player and take him, hopefully, from freshman to Heisman winner—feel. NCAA Football 14 wasn't the deepest game ever made, but CFB 25 has stripped so many features from that game that it feels empty as a result. Dynasty mode survives a bit better, although some customization options for your school that simply needed to be in the game are not; why can't I make formation subs before games, a feature that is doubly important with the new Wear And Tear mode that slowly but surely saps players of their abilities as they take hits? Elsewhere, the record-keeping is a mess. Why, for instance, is it so difficult to see who's leading the nation in passing yards? And there are other game-breaking bugs to be found here that I didn't cover above. Why does editing a player's number sometimes brick the player entirely, ruining their overall rating?
Road To Glory is even worse, and bereft of the charm from previous iterations; in earlier games of the series, a RTG player had a dorm room they could decorate, a silly but immersive bit of roleplay. The mode is also broken in its own ways, such as a Heisman-winning player coming back the next season to find themselves third on the depth chart simply due to a lower overall rating than a new transfer.
But these are things that can be fixed, and EA Sports released its first update notes on Monday, addressing a variety of these problems. That's to its credit, but it shouldn't require many, many patches to get a game that cost upwards of $70 into a workable state. That's the reality not just with CFB 25 but with all games in 2024. It's no less disappointing for how familiar it is. It also feels self-defeating: One would think that a company would want to ride the hype and catharsis of release by having its game in the best possible shape on day one. But the knowledge that "they can always patch it!" has made that less of a priority, at the expense of the most visible period of a game's life. I feel comfortable saying that CFB 25 was the most anticipated sports video game of all time; absence makes the sicko heart grow fonder. But the state of the game upon its release has dulled that excitement so heavily that even die-hard content creators have to send out posts detailing myriad issues that should never have made it past internal testing. These are people who want to love the game, finding that they can't. At least not yet.
If it feels like I am shitting on the game, I will be clear: despite all this, I am still having a blast with CFB 25. I am part of the problem, because I will absolutely eat the slop I'm served just to have a modern college football game in my life. Even if the game was in a worse state than it is, the ability to play an Online Dynasty with my best friend, as we have since that mode was introduced in NCAA Football 09, is worth the price of admission for me. In the week I've had the game, I've marveled at the way it has evolved, from the physics that allow each play to feel different than the one before to how stunning it looks in motion. (The commentary, on the other hand, needs a lot of work for the next release; the marquee duo of Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit especially sound like they are on the verge of naptime even during huge upsets.)
None of that excuses the bugs and disappointment; if anything, it makes them feel even worse, because there is plainly a great video game hiding somewhere underneath all this baggage and mess. For a game that was already delayed a year from its original 2023 release date, I expected CFB 25 to be near-perfect, or at least to arrive with issues that didn't impact my enjoyment as much as these have. That I am nevertheless still having a great time playing it might say more about how much I missed college football, as a game and in my life, than it does about what this particular game actually gets right. I could say that this game is a good foundation for the future, and that maybe CFB 26 will be better; from one moment to the next, I might actually believe it. But this was the best shot that EA Sports had to create a masterpiece without the financial pressure of yearly releases weighing down on the development process. That CFB 25 is merely "pretty good" is a bummer, even as I log in for more Dynasty mode. There's always more Dynasty mode.
