After a week or so of good news coming out of EA Sports (outside of the company laying off over 10% of it’s workforce) we received word that the new college football playoff system will not be in NCAA Football 14.
Upon first glance, this makes perfect sense because we know the new playoff system won’t be implemented until 2014. However, despite EA Sports’ strongest efforts to turn us all into ultimate team addicts, the vast majority of people who buy the game play it for dynasty mode in some form either offline or online.
In dynasty mode, you take control of a team for 5, 10, 20, or more years. Given that we know there will be a playoff system in 2014 and beyond, a game that calls itself “sim” should in fact take that into account and implement it into the game. The proper way to have handled this would be to have a BCS title game for the first year followed by a playoff system, like the one announced a few days ago, for every year after.
An EA Sports representative had this defense when questioned on the move, “We don’t yet have all the info about how the playoff system will work, including who will make up the selection committee and what their criteria will be for picking the playoff teams.” Upon first read the quote seems reasonable but when you dive in further, it reads as a steaming pile of horse crap. In the current system, does anyone really believe that they run the exact BCS calculations each year of your individual dynasty to determine rankings? The answer is no. They may have some algorithm that is generally fairly accurate but it is not nearly the same as what the BCS uses. It can’t be unless they run each online dynasty by real life college coaches and media members. Obviously, that notion is ridiculous.
The current ranking system used in NCAA Football games isn’t 100% accurate but it is close enough to the BCS that no one complains. It would not be that hard to do something similar with the new college football playoff system.
This seems like nothing more than a poorly veiled gimmick to persuade people to buy this year’s NCAA Football 14 game and then be forced to buy next year’s NCAA Football 15 game if they want to use the new playoff system. You have disappointed us again EA Sports. If you don’t include the ability to export draft classes to Madden 25 this year you will absolutely see the lowest sales figures for the NCAA Franchise in more than a decade.
