Heading into both the staff and community voting, it felt like a fait accompli that EA Sports College Football 25 would come out on top, and that is exactly how the voting went down. Without a shadow of a doubt, EA Sports College Football 25 is the Operation Sports 2024 Game of the Year.
It’s easy to craft the narrative for why the community voting ended up being so lopsided, and so I do at least have to run you through that aspect of it. This is a series that had been on the shelf since 2013, got its return announcement in February 2021, and then had over three years of hype behind it before it finally launched in July 2024. The streak of 11 years with no major college football game was finally broken in 2024, and that was met with both joy and a sigh of relief.
There was plenty of downtime between 2021 and 2024 where we would hear next to nothing for months on end about this series, and there were certainly moments where we questioned if College Football 25 would actually come out or not. But it did come out, had a relatively smooth launch, and it’s been a game that has continued to have legs since launch, which is the biggest reason I personally voted for it.
Since the community and staff both voted the same way down the board, I can share everything together and tell you this is how community voting shook out:
- College Football 25 (70 percent of the vote)
- MLB The Show 24 (11 percent of the vote)
- NBA 2K25 (7 percent of the vote)
- WWE 2K24 (3 percent of the vote)
- Madden NFL 25 (2 percent of the vote)
Our staff voting had the same top three in the same order, but we likely would have had Madden in the fourth spot if we went beyond a top three. Point being, it really was undisputed, and I don’t chalk that up to it just being a nostalgia pick or a relief that college sports are back. Whether you think it lived up to the hype or not is totally valid, and whether you like the style of EA’s football games is something that would be a roadblock as well, but there is a tangible element of care that went into College Football 25 that isn’t always felt in some of the other major sports games.
When I look back on the “golden age” of sports games from about 2000-2005, what stands out isn’t just the number of options we had to pick from during that era, it’s that a lot of those games were love letters to the sport in a way we don’t get as often anymore.
And, to be clear, I don’t think this is because developers don’t care or don’t love these sports, it’s just that priorities change, these games continue to grow in size, and it’s easier to lose the idea of what’s “important” in a sports game because now sports games are “do everything” games a lot of the time more than just a showcase of the real sport. In other words, what’s important to me in these sports games might not be important to someone else because we might basically be playing entirely different games at this point.
Think about how many modes and options are in something like NBA 2K25 versus a 2K game from 15 years ago and I might ask “are we better off now than we were in 2011?” And while I would pause for a moment before answering my own question by saying “yes we are” it’s because I would think about everything I don’t play in NBA 2K25. With NBA 2K11, I played the revolutionary Jordan Challenge, online and offline franchises, MyPlayer, and would still dabble in something like Blacktop mode. With NBA 2K25, I dabble in MyEras, I play a lot of WNBA stuff, and then I mostly just play one-off online games. I rarely touch MyPlayer anymore, and I don’t do MyTeam, MyGM, Blacktop, or a lot of other stuff that exists in the game. I play roughly 25-30 percent of what’s available to me in that game. On the other hand, you might play another 25-30 percent of the game I never even look at. You might be fully immersed in The City, and I wouldn’t even know how to fully relate to your experience at that point.
That’s both the gift and curse of sports gaming in the modern era. I can’t totally blame developers for not fixing or improving every aspect of a sports game year to year because in some ways these things have become bottomless pits of content. Like, yeah, of course a developer can’t totally improve a career mode, franchise mode, online play, card-collecting mode, graphics, presentation, and everything else to an impressive degree every 11 months or so.
In comparison, I look back to the golden era and I see SSX Tricky, Smackdown Here Comes the Pain, NBA Street Vol. 2, NFL Street 2, NFL 2K25, Madden 2005, MVP Baseball 2005, Gran Turismo 3, ESPN NHL Hockey, and honestly there are many more. None of those are “original” games but they’re games that absolutely tap into the heart of the thing they want to mimic, and some of those games are even culminations of many years of improvement before hitting truly unprecedented levels for that era. For example, Smackdown Here Comes the Pain didn’t come out of nowhere, you could sense it starting a couple years before with Just Bring It that they had finally started to figure something out that would help separate the Smackdown franchise from the previous gold standard of No Mercy.
Which returns me to our game of the year. I can point out a lack of a trophy room, a lack of full editing of the real players, a Road to Glory mode that doesn’t have high school games or some of the charm of the old version of that mode, and plenty of other things, but the love and passion in this game is still tangible. You can also make the counter that a lot of what’s great about College Football 25 is what was great about NCAA Football 14, but it’s not easy to battle it out with the nostalgia of ’14.
It would have been very easy for this to go very wrong for EA. The stadiums, the intros, the pageantry, the feel of a college football game is arguably the most important thing, and EA has not exactly been the premier company when it comes to nailing down the “vibe” of a sports game. 2K is the one that has dominated the presentation awards through the years, and Madden still lacks that heart of an NFL experience — even if the gameplay itself is improving year over year. But from the first moment you boot up this game, it absolutely has the feel of a college game. It taps into the same feelings I got from NCAA Football 14, and that’s the success here. That is not easy, and it’s not predestined to be true just because it’s technically the same company making a college football game. It doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen if you don’t have a ton of people who care deeply about college football itself creating the game.
It’s a bonus that while dynasty mode could be so much more, it is still far and away my most played mode in any sports game this year. I have played a countless number of offline dynasties, and I have been in two very active online dynasties for months as well. It also says something that while we don’t have full editing, at least EA tried to update the rosters and eventually get us more accurate numbers for players on those rosters.
It’s hard for me to say how things will look by this time next year and whether people will continue to give this series its flowers, but for the time being College Football 25 can stand in the end zone and do a little dance to celebrate a worthwhile return to the sports gaming world.
Published: Jan 6, 2025 05:00 pm