फुटबॉल रणनीतियों का विश्लेषण
सर्वश्रेष्ठ फुटबॉल डिफेंस रणनीतियाँ
EA Sports College Football 25: Best strategies, tips and tricks to win
Haven't played a football video game in a while? Here's your College Football 25 guide to passing, defense, recruiting and much more.
NCAA Football 14
After all the hours I’ve put in already, I have a few tips to share — especially for those who may not have touched a video game since <anchor>NCAA Football 14</anchor> — as the game gets its full standard edition release on Friday.
College Football 25 video game revival bittersweet for fans who kept NCAA Football 14 alive - The Athletic
Search

# College Football 25 video game revival bittersweet for fans who kept NCAA Football 14 alive

College Football 25 video game revival bittersweet for fans who kept NCAA Football 14 alive

Jul 18, 2024

Erik Vallow just couldn’t handle Isaiah Simmons’ speed rating being a 79.

The 19-year-old Vallow was in his freshman year at Indiana in 2019, trying to keep the spark of his favorite video game alive. But the game was NCAA Football 14, and the rosters were long outdated.

So like millions of other college football junkies, Vallow went online and downloaded an updated roster file, put together by an anonymous fan on a Discord server. That file contained the aforementioned Simmons discrepancy. Haphazard ratings like that ground Vallow’s gears. He had to do something about it.

Advertisement

“That one stuck out to me, and I was like, ‘If only I knew any way to do this other than manually on an Xbox,’” Vallow said. “And then flash forward to college, in freshman year my first class was an intro to Excel class, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the way. This is how I would do it.’”

Vallow went to work with his rudimentary Excel skills and built out player generation models to determine player ratings formulaically. He said Simmons’ speed was just one of many small things he took issue with in fan-made roster files. It spurred Vallow into a hobby that became an obsession and ended with a job.

Now 24, he parlayed a passion project of creating updated NCAA 14 roster files into a part-time job with EA Sports, where he applies his custom-made rating algorithms as a member of the roster creation team for College Football 25 — the first college football video game released in 11 years.

“When NCAA Football stopped, I thought we were never getting the game back. I thought that was it,” said Kofie Yeboah, a content creator with Secret Base who makes gaming videos. “It was like keep your Xbox 360, keep your PS3, because that’s the only way you’ll be able to play.”

Vallow made it his unpaid job to keep NCAA 14 as updated as possible, and he was determined to be methodical with his ratings. He didn’t want to base complex receiver ratings off two-dimensional statistics like receptions and yards. He didn’t want to gloss over the intricacies of offensive and defensive lineman skill sets. What he wanted was tangible data.

Then came Pro Football Focus. Around 2020, PFF — a sports analytics company that uses a grading system to evaluate every player on every play during a football game — started sharing its college football data publicly with its subscribers.

Vallow, who was then in his sophomore year and majoring in finance and business analytics with hopes of becoming an investment banker, dived into the data. Now he had real-life numbers to back up his video-game ratings. Some extra time from living back at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic helped too.

Advertisement

“My biggest thing I always wanted was for every stat, I wanted some sort of data backup for it,” he said. “So if someone asked, ‘Hey, why is so-and-so’s route running this number compared to that?’ Well, everything was always going back to data.”

Vallow later realized track and field statistics from a player’s high school and offseason training can give him even more information for rating physical traits.

When he started sharing his updated rosters publicly, people were shocked by the detail of the players’ physical attributes, even if there were naysayers who felt their school and favorite players were underrated. Vallow had learned to lean on his data.

“There’d be some guys from some MAC schools saying, ‘Hey, so and so (isn’t rated right)’ and I’d just say sorry and get to it in the next update,” he said with a laugh. “ Kansas was one where I just got ripped, and I was like ‘I’m trying — this is thousands of players!’”

After continuing to fine-tune his formulas while learning how to better interpret his data, Vallow proved his rating system was successfully scalable for thousands of players.

When EA Sports announced that a college football game was truly coming back, he reached out to an employee on LinkedIn and offered to share all the work he put together. He was soon hired as an independent contractor to work with their roster team.

“I got on a call and showed them, ‘Hey I could generate Alabama’s whole recruiting class right now just based on the data I have, just input and calculate,’” he said, “and I think they were like, ‘Oh, this is actually valuable.’”

At Operation Sports, thousands of users flock to hundreds of video game forum threads on a daily basis. The site’s college football community is among its most frequented destinations, and it’s a place where genuine relationships have formed over the years.

“In terms of the community itself, that’s a positive. There’s a lot of people who are friends and then they join Discords together as well, so there’s a lot of that stuff that’s still happening,” said Chase Becotte, senior editor of Operation Sports, comparing the users on his site to other forums.

Advertisement

“With Reddit, it is a more negative dogpile, and that’s on users as well as topics. We can still get negative about topics, but this community rules. I think it’s a good balance overall.”

While it’s not rare for a video game to have a devoted fan base, it’s far more common for communities to be devoted to hating the games themselves.

But in the decade-plus of the college football community going without a new game, something different happened with the people who kept NCAA 14 alive. That community thrived on both the nostalgia of NCAA 14 seeming like the last game of the series and also that it was a really well-made title, Becotte said.

“It’s pretty awesome,” Vallow said. “From the outside, if someone was telling me, ‘Me and all my friends talk online about this 10-year-old video game,’ I’d be like, ‘You guys are kind of losers.’ But then I’m like, ‘Wait a second, that’s me.’”

Roster updaters like Vallow had hundreds of fans giving feedback on ratings. Streamers like Yeboah have thousands of YouTube viewers watching him rebuild East Carolina in Dynasty mode.

“Here, it’s your sandbox and you’re sharing sandcastle creations with your friends, and it’s dope,” Yeboah said.

So what happens to those sandcastles now that the high tide of College Football 25 is rolling in  — complete with real players’ names, thanks to NIL?

Becotte called it bittersweet. Yeboah said he’ll have a hard time putting NCAA 14 away for good.

“You’re gonna make me cry, Mark,” Vallow said. “I don’t know what I’m gonna be like.”

In video games, an 11-year gap is like a 110-year technological leap in another industry. But for the gaming generation of yesteryear, Becotte and Vallow are confident that EA Sports has listened to its fan base over the past decade and are giving its community the features they’ve clamored for.

Advertisement

And if College Football 25 doesn’t live up to the legacy of NCAA 14? The old game won’t be far away.

“The community kept the game alive for as long as it needed to be,” Yeboah said, “and even when College Football 25 comes out, I feel like there’s still going to be a bunch of people that play NCAA 14 because that’s just how good the game is.”

Vallow was 13 years old when NCAA 14 was released. His younger brother was around 13 years old when Vallow was back home during COVID-19 making his roster updates. Now their youngest brother is 13 years old with College Football 25 coming out.

He said he has no idea if his younger brothers will appreciate the new game like he has for the past decade, but Vallow cherishes that the spirit of NCAA 14 will live on because fans have gotten to influence the next generation of college football games.

When he first started working with EA Sports, he was shocked to find fans like himself were the ones putting College Football 25 together.

“Obviously I’m going to miss that game, but also like you play it so much, there’s a little bit of you that thinks, ‘Maybe if this, this, this and this were different,’ and that’s the awesome thing that EA did. They listened and it seems like it was too good to be true,” Vallow said.

“I was like, ‘You guys were actually listening to the things people wanted?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we were those people.’”

(Top images of College Football 25 and NCAA Football 14 via EA Sports)

Get all-access to exclusive stories.

Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.

Start Free Trial

Mark Puleo

Mark Puleo is a News Staff Editor at The Athletic. Before joining The Athletic, Mark covered breaking weather news as a digital journalist and front page digital editor with AccuWeather. He is a graduate of Penn State University and its John Curley Center for Sports Journalism.Follow Mark on Twitter @ByMarkPuleo

National

US

Canada

Partners

Subscribe

HQ

Support

Newsletters