Fan favorite: EA Sports resurrecting popular college football video game

Gamers and college football fans, rejoice!

Top executives with EA Sports confirmed Tuesday that the company is reviving its wildly popular college football video game franchise, following an eight-year hiatus prompted by concerns over the rights of student athletes.

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Daryl Holt, EA Sports vice president and general manager, told ESPN the game maker plans to resurrect the former fan favorite as EA Sports College Football, but no timeline for the game’s development or release was provided beyond confirming it will not happen in 2021.

“As we look for the momentum that we’re building on in sports, it all starts with the passion of our fans and the opportunities of what they are interested in,” Holt told the sports news network. “I don’t think there’s a visit where I go outside wearing a piece of EA Sports-branded apparel that someone doesn’t go, ‘Hey, when is college football coming back?’”

Meanwhile, Cam Weber, the company’s executive vice president and group general manager, told The New York Times that EA Sports is “eager to bring a new game to players in the next couple of years.”

According to ESPN, the rebooted game will feature more than 100 Football Bowl Subdivision teams of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and EA Sports has partnered with collegiate licensing company CLC to ensure it has the FBS schools, traditions, uniforms and playbooks – among other details – ready for launch when the time comes.

Current NCAA rules prohibit student athletes from accepting any payment from a third party in exchange for the use of his or her name, image and likeness, but more than two dozen states have passed or proposed laws that would make it illegal for colleges to enforce those NIL rules, ESPN reported in September.

In turn, EA Sports is developing the college football reboot without rosters that include names, images or likenesses of real players, the sports news network reported.

“We’ll just keep tabs on everything as it develops, and we’ll be ready,” Holt said. “That won’t be a problem for us. But it’s really, that’s not an answer for us right now to decide. We’re as much passengers as anyone else.”

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Cox Media Group