EA Sports is rebooting NCAA Football franchise

It’s back.

The iconic — nay, legendary — NCAA Football video game franchise will be re-booted for the first time since 2013, when the cover athlete was the immortal Denard Robinson.

Instead of paying over $100 on eBay for a copy of NCAA Football 14, you can now wait for EA Sports to come out with a new version. The release date is still TBA, as there are numerous hoops for the game to get through.

EA Sports first has to obtain the proper licensing from college teams. Once they had that, they can create a video game with all the teams and uniforms, but without rosters that includes any current names, image or likeliness (NIL).

Issues of NIL was the reason the game ceased production in the first place. Even if rosters didn’t originally have names attached, everyone knew that the Colorado safety wearing #41 was Terrell Smith.

As of now, the game rosters won’t resemble real teams until NCAA rules change. However, the NCAA has been pressured by legislative bodies into allowing athletes to profit from their endorsements, so having NIL at some point appears likely, if not inevitable.

When the game returns, they will have changed the name from EA Sports NCAA Football XX to EA Sports College Football XX.

As far as the game play is concerned, the next iteration will look drastically different on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Hopefully the game will resemble the old NCAA Football games rather than the butchered and broken Madden series.