The timeline of EA Sports’ ‘NCAA Football’ video game series: Will it return?

It’s now been five years since EA Sports discontinued its college football video game series amid the NCAA’s legal crap. That’s sad to write. Now let’s really wallow in the sadness and think about the biggest loss: not getting to play Dynasty Mode with any of the following teams.

We all remember our greatest multi-year runs at certain virtual schools, turning the last-place Lower Butt Tech Rangoons into a revolving door for five-star pros, and some of us still tinker with dynasties in NCAA 14 to this day.

For the first time since EA Sports canceled the NCAA Football series after 2013, a new college football video game will be on the market in 2020, according to a press release from IMackulate Vision Gaming, a company founded by cousins Alex and Kameron Lewis. If you’re online a lot, you’ve seen most of these words before, though the date is a new detail. The company plans to release the game on PlayStation, XBox, and Steam platforms.

From the release:

Heisman winner Baker Mayfield, in a goodbye letter to Oklahoma posted at the Players’ Tribune:

Same, largely.

Here’s an ad by Sony, which began airing during college football’s opening weekend, in which two superstar college football head coaches and three NFL players who were recent stars at major college programs talk about bringing back greatness. Since it’s branded as a PlayStation ad, it’s got college football fans on red alert.

EA Sports’ NCAA Football series went away four years ago amid the NCAA’s court battles over player likenesses. Without a way to compensate players for appearing in the game, EA couldn’t risk further litigation, so the series halted.

Before its last edition, NCAA Football 14, EA Sports had been cranking out college football games for years and years. The game served as a perfect counterpart to the ongoing Madden series. From the epic loading screen that opens to the sound of college bands ...

... NCAA Football was an amazing series that experimented with some awesome game modes over the years.

EA Sports isn’t releasing a college football game this year, just as it hasn’t since NCAA Football 14 came out in 2013. Seeing as this is mid-July, this is the exact time of the year at which the game would’ve come out. Because of that and the college football season still being more than a month away, jonesing is at peak levels.

We don’t know exactly how all 130 FBS teams would’ve been rated in NCAA 18, but we can take a guess. I used Bill Connelly’s S&P+ projections for each team — which factor recruiting, returning production, and recent history — and crammed those numbers into a 60-to-99 range, like what EA used in 14, then did some fiddlin’ to account for coaching changes, transfers, and such.

The new story mode in Madden NFL 18 traces a wayward player’s career from high school to college to the pros, similar to other story modes in sports video games.

So how are they gonna put college teams in a video game when they can’t make college video games any more, huh?

A top executive at video game giant Electronic Arts believes his company’s NCAA Football franchise will someday make a return.

Peter Moore, EA’s former chief operating officer and current “chief competition officer,” sat for a lengthy interview with IGN (below) and, around the 56:00 mark, delved into the college football game all of us so desperately miss.

The annual release of the Madden NFL video game is, for some, a holiday. But for diehard college football video gamers, it’s a somber reminder of what’s been lost.

EA Sports’ Madden 17 came out on Tuesday. But the last release of EA’s NCAA Football game was in the summer of 2013, before it got swept up in the NCAA’s battle to avoid paying its players for much of anything, including their in-game likenesses.

The reason EA Sports stopped making its NCAA Football video game series after 2013 is pretty simple.

It became a big legal problem for the game creator to use player likenesses without paying them for their faces and bodies, while the NCAA viewed the alternative – letting someone pay its players with real money – as anathema to the notion of amateurism that undergirds the organization’s entire business model.

You want EA Sports to bring back its NCAA Football franchise. I want EA Sports to bring back its NCAA Football franchise. Lots of people want EA Sports to bring back its NCAA Football franchise, and now “lots of people” is a group that includes the director of the highly popular post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 4.

“NCAA Football was one of my favorite games; they don’t make it anymore,” game director Todd Howard said this week at a gaming conference, according to GameStop. “While I’m here, EA, can you make NCAA Football again, please? That game honestly was important to me. I would play and win the national championship, recruit my team – the pride I felt in doing it.”

ESPN commentator Kirk Herbstreit, who was also the man telling you to punt more frequently in the final editions of EA Sports’ NCAA Football series, discussed the end of the game with the AJC’s SEC Country:

The series ended amid lawsuits over likeness rights. EA quite clearly had been putting actual people in its commercial products without paying them, meaning it had stuck itself between NCAA laws and actual laws. The company’s been vague about its future plans for the series, last week denying a cryptic Facebook video was meant to hint at its return.

The NCAA cancelled its relationship with EA Sports in 2013, due in part to a settled lawsuit that ended up with former players getting a cut of the money the association made off the NCAA Football video games.

However, this video post by the game’s official Facebook page makes it seem like there is some hope for a return of the game:

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the NCAA violates antitrust laws by curbing how much athletes can receive while playing collegiate sports.

The ruling did have some of the same “amateurism is amateurism because amateurism” language we’ve seen from the NCAA in recent years, however.

Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California issued a 99-page opinion and injunction, stating that the NCAA can no longer stop schools from giving athletes money based on their names, images and likenesses (NIL), and it is not allowed to impose a salary cap below $5,000. That money can be put in a trust.

However, the NCAA scored a major win in that it can still stop athletes from marketing themselves, since Wilken claimed that is a legitimate pro-competitive rule.

Wednesday was a big day for the O’Bannon plaintiffs taking on the NCAA in the athlete likeness trial, but the day was just as important for video gamers. EA executive Joel Linzner took the stand for the plaintiffs and said that he would like to bring back the EA college football video games, which were discontinued because of the lawsuit.

EA discontinued the game, because it was being sued for not paying players whose likenesses were used in the game and couldn’t pay them because NCAA rules didn’t allow it. EA then settled for $40 million.

The O’Bannon case got off to a surprising start on Monday, as the NCAA and the plaintiffs of the Sam Keller lawsuit, which regards the use of athletes’ likeness in video games, announced that they had reached a settlement. From the NCAA:

Electronic Arts and the Collegiate Licensing Company, who were originally involved in the case, had previously settled for $40 million, bringing the total amount of money awarded to athletes who appeared in NCAA video games to $60 million. A settlement was bound to happen at some point, since EA’s testimony had pretty much destroyed any hope the NCAA had of winning that case.

The NCAA has issued a statement in response to Electronic Arts’ recent $40 million settlement, and it’s just as stubbornly unaware of itself as the organization’s previous statements on issues pertaining to athlete compensation. The settlement in question will pay college athletes whose likenesses were illegally used by the company in various college football and basketball video games.

The statement, in full:

Electronic Arts has settled with the plaintiffs of the Keller suit for $40 million in damages, paying money it owed college athletes for illegally using their likenesses in its college football and basketball video games. However, O’Bannon lawsuit plaintiffs claim in a recent court filing that they will present at trial evidence that EA wanted to pay the players, even though the NCAA wouldn’t allow it, due to its amateurism rules.

Players in other sports are compensated ahead of time for the use of their likenesses in video games, as EA does with the NFLPA when making its NFL games.

Attorneys representing student-athletes who sued EA Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Company have filed a motion to approve a settlement. The suit stems from EA Sports and the CLC illegally using student-athletes’ likenesses in video games over many years.

The settlement, which is worth $40 million, covers claims made in the Keller vs. Electronic Arts case and O’Bannon vs. NCAA case, as well as the Alston vs. NCAA and Hart vs. Electronic Arts cases. Student-athletes represented could receive up to $951 for each year they were featured in the video games, according to a press release from public relations firm Firmani and Associates. ESPN’s Tom Farrey reports that as many as 100,000 current and former football and basketball players could be covered. Attorneys will receive up to $13.2 million in the settlement, per Farrey.

On February 20, Federal District Court Judge Claudia Wilken ordered that 18 documents previously filed with the court be provided to the public. The documents, which had been filed “under seal” by O’Bannon and other players as part of a motion, were deemed to not to have met the standard needed to remain confidential.

Those documents were released Wednesday, providing hundreds of pages of new material for those watching the O’Bannon case. The trove, mostly originating from the NCAA or Electronic Arts and obtained by the O’Bannon plaintiffs in discovery, highlight many of the contradictions in the NCAA’s case and provide further insight into the NCAA’s knowledge of EA’s use of player likenesses.

The NCAA sued Electronic Arts and Collegiate Licensing Company, alleging that the video game developer and licenser failed to maintain sufficient insurance to cover claims made by players and asking that the parties’ proposed settlement with players be stopped. According to Steve Berkowitz of USA Today, the NCAA filed the suit in a Georgia state court on Nov. 4, alleging that Electronic Arts failed to maintain sufficient insurance to cover the claims and attorney fees associated with the O’Bannon suit.

The landmark lawsuit, which began as a challenge to EA’s NCAA Football franchise, has become a case about the millions of dollars paid for television rights to NCAA football and basketball broadcasts. EA and the CLC announced a $40 million settlement with the O’Bannon plaintiffs two months ago. The settlement left the NCAA as the sole remaining defendant against the players, with television as the sole remaining issue. The NCAA’s suit demands that the settlement be annulled, bringing EA and the CLC back into the case and putting those issues back on the table.

As part of its settlement to get out of the O’Bannon lawsuit, EA Sports announced it will discontinue its incredibly popular college football franchise. However, a lawyer representing players in the case told Polygon that ending the series was never his or his colleagues’ intent.

EA and the Collegiate Licensing Company settled their part of the O’Bannon case last week, agreeing to pay out $40 million to thousands of players involved. There could be as many as 300,000 former and current players represented, which would average out to roughly $133 per individual -- before attorney fees and taxes, of course. Although, it’s not certain if current players would be allowed to accept settlement money under NCAA rules.

College Football 15, the next edition of EA Sports’ NCAA Football series, is dead. Dead as dead can be. What it could have been, though, is a radically different, expansive addition to the collection, one that offered levels of customization far beyond what game players have had in years past. It even drew a comparison to Dungeons & Dragons and Minecraft. Yeah, D&D.

In this profile by Kotaku, which is focused largely on the effect EA’s decision not to publish a college football game has had on its developers (many of whom are now out of jobs), this tidbit about the upcoming features was fascinating:

EA Sports announced Thursday that the video game company wouldn’t produce a 2014 edition of its beloved college football franchise, and that it had reached a settlement for its part in the O’Bannon case. That settlement, which is also being paid by the Collegiate Licensing Company, is worth $40 million, according to the New York Times.

Attorney Michael Hausfeld, who represents the players in the case, confirmed the figure to the Times. But, just how the money will be distributed has not yet been determined. The settlement affects roughly 125,000 current and former football and basketball players, per CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd, which would average out to approximately $320 per player. But ESPN reports the number could be more like 300,000, which would make the initial average something like $133.