The endless season: 10 years of 'NCAA Football 14'

I’m hooked again.

Having built the lowly Eastern Michigan Eagles into a national powerhouse, winning six national championships and something like 120 games in a row (which is absurd even for a video game), I decided it was time to start another dynasty in NCAA Football 14. Since I like to build championship contenders out of perennial doormats, I created a new coach and became the offensive coordinator for the Idaho Vandals.

My first season at the helm of the Idaho offense was frustrating but also a lot of fun. The Vandals finished the 2013 season with a 4-8 record, which included a 44–3 drubbing by Temple at home. I agonized over dropped passes but celebrated upset wins over Washington State and Florida State. I became engrossed in recruiting (which I need to do for the whole team despite my focus on the offense), settling on busts because they are better than the players I have and contemplating how best to develop pipelines. After catching 60-some passes for over 1,000 yards, I was sure my tight end was a shoo-in for the Mackey Award, but was dismayed to find he was not even a finalist. (Maybe it had to do with the 22 passes he dropped. Yikes!) An independent program in 2013 (the WAC discontinued football after 2012 and Idaho joined the Sun Belt in 2014), I moved the Vandals to the Mountain West and am eager to start the next season.

(The real-life 2013 Idaho Vandals had a 1-11 record. Ironically, they were destroyed by Washington State [42–0] and Florida State [80–14], but beat Temple, 26–24.)

The first season of my new dynasty was what I needed after years of blowing out opponents for the sake of breaking school and national records. It rekindled my love for the NCAA Football franchise, whose most recent (and maybe final) edition was released 10 years ago this summer.

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I wrote that lede, minus a couple edits, five years ago to commemorate the game’s fifth anniversary. The document has been sitting on my laptop desktop, unfinished, ever since, so I decided to finish it to honor and rereview the game for its 10th anniversary.

With Michigan Wolverine Denard Robinson gracing its cover, NCAA Football 14 hit shelves on July 9, 2013, and I have been playing it ever since I bought it (probably a month or so after it was released). The game has held up well; 2014 does its job and still looks good, though I don’t play a lot of other video games at the moment and can’t compare it to anything else. (The Foxy Lady bought me FIFA 2023 for the Switch last year. It’s fun, but I can’t say it has much better graphics than my 2005 edition for the PS2.) Besides featuring the BCS to choose national championship contenders, outdated conference alignments, and former bowl games/names, it does not feel dated or embarrassingly old, though such is the nature of college football despite constant changes: the more things change, the more they stay the same. (If it’s in the game, as EA’s former motto says, it’s in the game.)

The game is not without flaws or its own quirks, as I wrote in my original review, though many have been resolved after updates, including the weird gray facemask issue.

• I have become accustomed to the filler animation between plays, so the games no longer seem slow (or I figured out a hack to speed things up).

• It is annoying that receivers do not automatically catch passes in stride, but I make it work and have not noticed the issue recently, so perhaps it was resolved through updates. The same goes for options. (I can’t remember if I used the read option in earlier versions of the franchise, but I’ve become quite a fan.)

• Running is hard. I feel like there are not as many breakaways as in past editions, though that could be my fault for depleting a runner’s energy and/or not recruiting faster players. I am also not as adept at using stiff arms, spins, and jukes to avoid tackles. Which button does what changed fairly often during the franchise, and I was totally lost when juking moved from the L and R buttons to the right stick.

• Teams get snubbed because the dynasty mode uses the BCS, which is a problem that probably plagues every edition of the franchise—though it is not like the new FBS playoff system has fixed that.

• Speaking of dynasty mode, one gripe I have is that it is impossible to win the Heisman in 2014. Even if you have a player whose stats are head and shoulders above everyone else’s, he won’t win it. The second or third player on the Heisman-watch list will always win it instead. That said, your star player has to back into it. The only player of mine to win the Heisman, an EMU running back, won it despite getting the third most first-place votes.

• When picking which end zone to defend after the coin toss, I cannot figure out which way the wind is blowing. There is an arrow showing the wind direction and speed, but I can’t figure out how that corresponds to the field, which end zone to pick so the wind is at my back during the second and fourth quarters.

• Recruiting is one of the best parts of the franchise, and the points system used in 2014 is a huge improvement from the previous system. However, I wish it was easier to toggle between the recruiting board and your team’s needs. As is, it is a little clunky and time consuming.

• It is awesome that one can customize conferences/divisions, though I think that has been around for a few years. One has the ability to completely blow up the entire college football landscape.

• As Idaho’s offensive coordinator, I do not understand why I have to recruit for the entire team. Part of that may be a programming decision: EA did not feel the need to have multiple versions of recruiting tailored to each coaching type. I understand that.

The game is not perfect, but it is fun, as it always has been. It has been there for me all these years. Despite having every even-year version of the game going back to 2002, I always play 2014. (I popped 2006 into my PS2 a few weeks ago and played it for old-time’s sake. It’s my favorite version; the soundtrack has a special place in my heart, mostly because I heard it over and over for years. However, I realized I’ve lost my touch with it—and that my original PS2 controller needs to be replaced.) I’m unsure why, really. Maybe I felt like I could not go back to past versions. It’s silly, but why do it when you’re having so much fun with the latest edition? 2014 has been that edition for 10 years.

Though I cannot say I have missed having new versions of the franchise, especially since it has saved me $60 or so every other year, I miss their release because it was a rite of summer, a sign that the next season was around the corner. “When I was in college,” I wrote in my original review of 2014, “the latest release provided a weeks-long honeymoon filled with hard hits, pylon dives, and ‘instant classics’ against friends....” It stoked our love of college football after months without it.

A successor called College Football has been teased ever since NCAA’s demise, and it is supposedly scheduled to be released in summer 2024. But I’ll believe it when I buy it and start playing it. The biggest hurdle, I am sure, is using player names, images, and likenesses. I believe college players should be compensated for NIL use, and I really hope EA and the rest of college athletics do it right this time; what happened in the past was straight exploitation. The fanbase is still there, as may be evident by the price of 14 on Amazon: Xbox 360 versions cost around $200 and PS3 versions hover around $100. (No PS4 version of the game was released, which I did not realize until my short time as a PS4 owner. I assumed there would be a PS4 version, but the PS4 was not released until later in 2013.) Until a revival is released, I will remain hooked on 2014, trying to build the Vandals into a powerhouse.

How is my Idaho dynasty doing? (I can’t believe I started it five years ago!) It’s going well, though I am still in my second season. Months pass between the games I play, but I am slowly but surely building an offensive juggernaut. My offense improved a lot when I ditched Idaho’s default playbook and started using the customized one I used with Eastern Michigan. (The Foxy Lady was not happy to see that it is called “Deep Throat.” Oops!) My goal with the dynasty is to move to different programs and eventually become a head coach somewhere.

(If my graphic design skills were much better, I would try to make a parody of The Endless Summer poster with football players.)