Michigan Football: A new NCAA video game is coming out and it’s exciting

Over the last few months, word has come out that a new college football video game plans to be released. Of course, any Michigan football fan knows that the last NCAA football video game to come out (NCAA Football 14) featured electric former U-M QB Denard Robinson on the cover.

While it will be sad to see the video game with a Michigan football player on the cover become outdated in a few years, it is still a welcome change for all who love sports video games.

Us as just video game lovers and college football junkies have been waiting forever for the new video game to finally come out. It seems like the video game was supposed to come out years ago, but it kept getting blocked by outside forces for whatever reason for the longest time.

Basically, the main reason the NCAA football video game franchise stopped production was because of basically NIL and copyright issues. Because the schools that were featured in the video game didn’t receive money, and weren’t really able to benefit off the video game themselves, they no longer wanted video games associated with their programs.

The same thing goes for the players. Everything associated with a football team (players included) felt they had a right to make money off their brand, image, and likeness.

Pretty much like the NIL issue, and that’s why production of the video game stopped. There was the whole Ed O’Bannon case as well, and although it dealt with the NCAA basketball side, it still had a lot of impact on the football side because football people felt the same way.

Imagine if Denard Robinson could’ve made money off of his NIL. With the NCAA 14 video game still being so popular, Denard would have made a fortune off of himself.

The NCAA football video game should have all-decade teams

If the NCAA video game creators were smart, they would create not just the official rosters of the current college teams, but have all-decade teams as well. Decade meaning within the last 10 seasons of the video game being released (in a few more years) since it is now the new decade.

The NBA 2k franchise has added a similar mode to this, the all-time teams, in their last few video game iterations. Wouldn’t it be awesome to play as the 2016 Michigan football team with players like Jabrill Peppers, Jake Butt, Jourdan Lewis, Chris Wormley, etc?

I can’t stress enough how dominant U-M’s 2016 football team was for 85-90% of the season. They just got unlucky at the end of the year, but that is an all-decade squad in my opinion.

What about ‘15 Clemson with Deshaun Watson? ‘15 Alabama with Derrick Henry? ‘19 LSU with Joe Burrow? ‘20 Alabama with DeVonta Smith?

U-M fans would definitely enjoy playing as all-decade U-M teams and destroying their opposition, especially rivals, hanging 100 on them (I’m looking at you OSU). It would be awesome to see what some of these U-M teams could do against some other all-decade squads.

So, this is really exciting news and it just lines up with the NIL rights that players are going to get as well. And, it will hopefully include the CFP expansion format in season mode which should be very exciting in its own right.