For Daryl Holt, the attention only intensified after he was approached in a Krispy Kreme several years ago.
Holt is a senior vice president and group general manager for EA Sports, a role in which he has overseen the much-anticipated return of the NCAA football video game franchise, whose latest edition, “EA Sports College Football 25,” releases to the general public on Friday after an 11-year hiatus.
In the years leading up to the game’s release, Holt drew inquiring minds when he wore EA Sports apparel in public or when people learned about his job. There was the man who approached him while he ate a hot glazed doughnut at that Krispy Kreme, questioning when EA Sports would bring the game back. Since then, the inquiries only increased, coming from people across the sports world and even politicians calling for more information.
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“Just recently at a partnership meeting someone brought up the college football title and wanted to ask me about their school and how it’s represented in the game,” Holt said. “I’m getting detailed questions about the game itself that at that time I couldn’t answer, but I did not expect at a partnership meeting to start talking about a different line of business.”
EA Sports inaugurated its college football series in 1993 with the release of “Bill Walsh College Football” for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. College Football USA followed for two years starting in 1995, and by 1997 the game was dubbed NCAA Football after the gaming company acquired licensing rights to the NCAA name.
Over a 20-year period, the game developed a devoted following.
Gamers fought recruiting battles over fictional five-star athletes and built powerhouses from small schools in the game’s dynasty mode. While the rosters in professional sports titles such as the Madden NFL series featured athletes with the same names as those seen playing on Sundays, NCAA Football offered no such luxury, because NCAA policy at the time forbade players from making money off their names, images and likenesses (NIL).
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Sure, the starting quarterback for Texas in “NCAA Football 06” closely resembled Vince Young, but in the game his name was QB #10. Some gamers would spend days researching school rosters and manually renaming the players to create a more authentic experience. And beyond its cultural impact, the series was considered commercially successful, with its last edition, “NCAA Football 14,” selling about 1.5 million copies.
I remember being a kid and staying up till 3am playing the NCAA Football games.
Now that I am an adult with a wife, 2 kids, a job and other adult responsibilities… I stayed up till 4am playing College Football 25. #CollegeFootball25
— Garret Price (@DynastyPrice) July 16, 2024Uncertainty in the real world
The game was discontinued in 2013 after former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon’s 2009 lawsuit against the NCAA over its use of players’ images and likenesses without compensation. A U.S. district judge in 2014 ruled the NCAA’s use of college athletes’ names, images and likenesses without compensation violated antitrust law. The Supreme Court in 2016 declined requests to review the case, and the NCAA in 2021 allowed athletes to benefit from NIL.
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“The NIL landscape, the legal outcomes of the O’Bannon case and the undecided nature of it,” Holt said of the factors that influenced EA’s decision. “There was an aspect of the case that opened up a very large discussion that even to this day is not completely settled.
“It wasn’t a lack of design ideas. It wasn’t a lack of sales. It wasn’t a lack of interest in the sport or the title or the game. It was a majority of that uncertainty in the real world of sports that created a minefield for us to navigate.”
Christian McLeod joined EA Sports as a designer in 2011 and worked on the last three editions of the game before its end in 2013. He described the game’s cessation as “heartbreaking” and a “gut punch” for a production team that featured developers with more than a decade of experience with the title, some of whom came to EA specifically to work on NCAA football.
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After the title’s demise, its developers scattered. Some left for other studios or the defense industry. McLeod stayed, pivoting to work on Madden NFL and NBA Live.
In the ensuing years, some employees held out hope for the game’s return. Quietly, a small cohort periodically updated designs and data related to the game, in hopes that it would come back.
“On the side, there was a contingent of 10 to 15 of us that were always ideating,” said McLeod, who now serves as production director for EA Sports College Football. “We were kind of like the bearers of hope, right, the bearers of all the old documents from back in the day.”
When Holt began working on football for EA Sports in 2018, he said college football stood out as an opportunity for the developer. Since 2013, internal conversations around NCAA Football centered on the reasons they couldn’t make the game. Holt began to reframe and entered 2019 considering how they could bring it back.
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It’s around that time that interest started to intensify. Holt said he fielded more questions about when the game might return when he wore EA Sports apparel in public. Within the office, the questions were constant.
“At a town hall, I’d get a question. I’d have meetings with different people and get that question. It was a constant thing,” he said. “They’d even start to [tweak] the question a bit by saying, ‘Well, what title are you hoping to bring back?’”
Holt officially pitched the title’s return in December 2019 to EA Sports President Cam Weber. With the company on board entering 2020, Holt began to assemble the nucleus of the production team and plan how itwould approach schools and licensing partners. When the game’s return was announced in February 2021, “not everything was figured out yet, but we had different ideas.”
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Roughly two years before, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would allow student-athletes in the state to accept compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness. Similar legislation was subsequently introduced in other states and in June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA’s limits on education-related perks for college athletes. Holt believes EA Sports’ announcement about the game’s return helped push forward the conversation about college athlete compensation.
“I think we did open that conversation up a bit because people started to use the game as an example and, in some cases, the lead example,” he said. “We were already building a team to build the game without NIL, but we were always holding out some level of hope and confidence that it would get solved while we were developing the game.”
EA sent NIL offers worth $600 each to more than 11,000 Football Bowl Subdivision athletes to compensate them for the use of their likeness in the new game (those who opt-in also receive a copy of the game). The company anticipated around 8,000 would sign up, but more than 14,800 athletes opted in within four months of those offers, according to Holt.
A much-anticipated return
Fans and gamers were thrilled to hear the game would return. College players are excited to see themselves in it. That enthusiasm also spawned a small group of reporters who provided incremental updates about the game as its release approached.
Matt Brown accidentally stumbled upon the beat.
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Around late 2020, Brown, who runs the Extra Points newsletter, heard rumors of the game’s return ahead of its official announcement. He was working on a story about universities looking to license and create their own beer and filed open records requests to glean correspondences between schools and a licensing company that works with the NCAA.
He said a request related to Bowling Green turned up a trove of documents, including some related to licensing rates. Also included was a five-page memo that read “extremely confidential” at the top. It was the formal project proposal from EA Sports about the game.
“As soon as I saw that, I said, ‘Oh s---, this is way more interesting,’” Brown said.
Brown then got to work, wrote a post noting the game’s initial release date and shared it on social media to great interest. Shortly after, he created a system to learn more about the game by filing requests to a variety of schools.
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“EA has to work with a bunch of public institutions. Every time they’re asking people for stadium assets or for uniform assets or audio, there’s a paper trail,” he said, referencing the digital elements that help form a video game. “After four months and a handful of posts, I began to realize there is no level of information that is too minute, too inside baseball. People will respond to it because the appetite for any information about this game is just insatiable.”
Brown is no longer surprised by the level of interest from college football fans and gamers. What’s intriguing to him is the level of interest from schools and administrators, whom he said view the game as an opportunity for brand exposure among younger generations and future applicants.
“They’re struggling to reach younger fans, and they recognize that being a part of a mass market video game offers enormous marketing potential that they couldn’t pay for any other way,” Brown said. “[Football Championship Subdivision] schools aren’t in this game, but boy I’ve talked to at least a dozen leaders who have been like, ‘We’d do it for free.’ I think it’s particularly true for HBCU institutions that recognize this is a way to remind people what makes their culture and school environment special.”
Gamers with early access have celebrated “College Football 25” since it became available to them earlier this week. Come Friday, there certainly will be plenty of fans pulling late night marathons.
For Holt, Friday’s release will be more cathartic than nostalgic. He will monitor the game’s launch during the day, and when he gets home, he will take a deep breath and pour himself a celebratory glass of cabernet sauvignon.
“It feels like I will summit a mountain,” he said. “One I’m waiting to see the horizon on.”
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