EA Sports College Football 25 has sparked millennial nostalgia for NCAA Football 14.

Timothy Foster needed something to look forward to when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma last summer. The 35-year-old software developer, from upstate New York, knew he would have lots of time to kill while he recovered from his chemotherapy infusions, but what is there to do when you’re laid up in bed all day?
Foster wasn’t really a gamer. Yes, he had owned an NES and SNES in the ’90s, but the last video game he had played in earnest was NCAA Football 14—a beloved 2013 college football simulator that was the final entry in a series that was discontinued following an arcane legal dispute between the powers that be in campus athletics and publisher EA Sports. (It all came down to how the NCAA defined sports amateurism, a term that carries less meaning by the day.) But the landscape of college football has changed dramatically over the past few years, following a windfall of suddenly legal name, image, and likeness deals that freed up players to make money from outside sources. All this ultimately cleared a path for a revival of the one video game Foster ever truly loved. College Football 25 was released on July 19, and Foster purchased a PS5—the first console he has owned in over a decade—with plans to captain his beloved Syracuse Orange to immortality.
If you’ve never played an NCAA game before, some context: It functions in essentially the same way football simulators always have. In the game, you’re not just playing as the athletes; you’re also making coaching, recruiting, and funding decisions. Players take control of all the operational overhead of a gridiron program—the reads a quarterback makes under center, the specifics of the defensive scheme, and even the price of concessions available at the stadium—allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the fantasy of being a big-shot athletic director. This is fun in an NFL setting but even more compelling in the world of college football because of the way EA’s game lets you muck around in the underworld of recruiting, patronage, and other duplicitous tactics one must deploy to build up an amateur roster. Is there a five-star cornerback you have your eye on? Maybe you want to send him a DM and fly him out to campus in order to optimize the chances he accepts a scholarship offer. Foster has been at this for weeks.
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“I am already in Year 3 with my Orange,” he said. “After burning through this dynasty, I am looking forward to starting another one with a Group of Five team for a full rebuild process and trying to promote my team to the big leagues. To me, college football games, as opposed to any other sports games, have the ability to make you feel like you have created your own alternate universe, where you have created an entire universe in which Kent State is an absolute juggernaut.”
Foster isn’t alone. At 33, I find that most of my friends are lapsed gamers. Yes, some of them have held on to the hobby past their formative high school and college years, dogmatically updating their drivers and remaining eternally eager to drop thousands of dollars on new GPUs. But they’re firmly in the minority. Most of my male friends seldom power on their PlayStation unless it’s to indulge in a couple of dorm-room staples: Madden, Grand Theft Auto, maybe the occasional giddy-drunk Rock Band session, if they’ve managed to hang on to the plastic instruments. This is a classic symptom of aging. With responsibilities like child-rearing and wedding planning, one must be fairly intentional if they are to make time for video games. And honestly? That is what has made the spectacular rise of College Football 25 so heartening. The game has clearly struck a chord with American thirtysomethings. In its first week, dozens of washed millennials proudly announced on social media that, like Foster, they had just bought their first console in decades, all seduced by the possibility of a most fundamental pleasure—recruiting a five-star gunslinger and torching the rest of the SEC.
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“I started carefully approaching the idea with my wife earlier in the year, knowing that with us having a baby, the prospects of her being happy with me dropping $500 on a new system and the game” were low, said Conor Shea, a 30-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, who hasn’t regularly played a video game since 2016. Shea and his wife came to an agreement: He could purchase a PS5 if he raised the money himself and didn’t tap into either of their bank accounts. Shea got to work. He cashed in some of his gambling winnings and a few penny stocks and sold some secondhand bric-a-brac in his garage, including a bicycle, a couch, and a “prized retro Louisville Cardinals jacket.” Before long, Shea had the funds.
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“In all the planning I made for buying and securing this game and a PS5, I made the error of not realizing my in-laws had scheduled a beach vacation for the same week as the game’s release,” continued Shea, who spoke to me before the game officially came out. “So I’ve been FOMO’ing all week, and I won’t be able to play until I get home Sunday. But as soon as I do, I’m going to fire up the game, start a game with Louisville vs. Kentucky, and my first play will be taking a knee out of respect for the moment and all the games that came before it, especially NCAA Football 14. Then I’ll immediately run a HB wheel and torch Kentucky.”
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Shea’s hunger for a new college football game has been sharpened by all the amateur greats he never got the chance to pilot himself. As a Louisville fan, he’s particularly mournful that the series wasn’t revived for Lamar Jackson’s epic college career, a sensation that I’m sure is mirrored by Clemson diehards during the Trevor Lawrence renaissance or Alabama backers who were around for the giddy heights of the late Saban empire. (That said, as a University of Texas fan, I do not miss the doldrums of the 2010s whatsoever.) But at its essence, college football fandom has always been focused more on the past than on the future, so I wasn’t surprised when Shea told me he’s mostly excited for the chance to re-create one of the only times he was truly happy: running the triple option with the boys in a dank living room on a hot July night, six High Lifes deep across the board.
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“For me, it’s those last days of summer I spent with my brother and friends playing [NCAA Football 14] that I remember so strongly,” he said. “Most of us are married with kids now, so I’m sure the time we can devote to the game will be drastically different, but I think the excitement comes from wanting to relive those glory days with each other.”
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Alex Cook, a 31-year-old from Michigan, is going even further. He’s in a group chat with the same eight friends he played NCAA Football 14 with in high school, and together they’ve been hatching a plan to renew their dynasty league. Cook said they’ve all decided to take a few weeks to get a feel for the new game’s mechanics—dusting off their joysticks—before jumping into a full-blown round-robin schedule, essentially role-playing a Power Five conference in the months ahead. “Nothing is better than playing with the boys,” said Cook.
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“The game presents a rare opportunity to connect with our friends and with our younger selves. I have so many fond memories of playing NCAA when I was a kid—an online dynasty that lasted a dozen seasons, staying up until 5 in the morning during the summer, building New Mexico State into a powerhouse,” he continued. “I realize that the experience won’t be exactly the same, and I know there are plenty of other ways to feel this type of community. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, though, and we’ve all missed picking up the sticks and playing some college football.”
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Cook is articulating the one inescapable truth about college football. No sport in America—not the NBA or the NFL or the freakishly cultlike devotees of the MLS or the NHL—is capable of summoning up our most flagrant compulsions quite like the amateur game. There are fans, and there are people who lose sleep at night while scrutinizing unclaimed national titles and the contours of conference realignment. College Football 25 has the latter demographic in its clutches. It plunges players headfirst into the disorienting morass of amateur athletics, asking us questions that should never be answered, like “Do you want to scroll through the nether regions of Northwestern’s depth chart?” It is so easy to dive into NFL fandom rather than experience the rigors of college fandom, during which entire Saturdays might be burned off in service to 70–0 shutouts of Appalachian State. This one, my friends, is for the freaks and sickos.
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“The further you get away from college, the closer you want to get to the happiest time in your life,” said Matt Berry, a massive Georgia fan who, you guessed it, has just purchased a new console to play College Football 25. “You can add Tulane and Georgia Tech back into the SEC. You can put the Pac-10 back together. You can set the universe right, or at least to the way it was when you were 18 years old. Because that’s what you always want it to be.”
I wish Berry, and his fleet of aging millennials, the best of luck. Chasing down the erstwhile satisfaction of your youth is never easy, but it’s often a noble cause. Maybe life doesn’t have to be so complicated. Maybe the only fulfillment we need is a jet sweep to the house in Sanford Stadium.