Penn State got a handful of clips in the EA College Football 25 trailer, which dropped on Friday:

Looks kinda sick, yeah?

There’s a lot of buzz for this game around the country, but here in Philly? Not sure. We’re not a college football town and I’m genuinely curious how many people played this series back in the day, before it went on an 11-year hiatus. The last edition came out in 2013, and this one is slated for a July 19th release, about 5 weeks before the college football season begins.

The reason the series stopped is because of name, image, and likeness issues. Legal problems mucked up the whole thing back then because of amateurism, in the days before the NIL landscape changed.

Andrew Olson at our sister site Saturday Down South explained how EA is handling this in 2024:


EA Sports’ College Football 25 video game is getting closer. (in February), the company announced that all 134 FBS programs are participating in the game and will be available to players.

It also marked the opening of the window for players to opt in to be featured in the game. Players who agree to the game will receive $600 and a copy of the game for their preferred platform. Players who decline will have a generic avatar used in their place.

With 11,000 players, no company has taken on a college athlete compensation project of this scale.

There will also be an ambassador program. ESPN reports that there will be more than 100 additional NIL opportunities for athletes, which social media posts, on-campus promotions and advertisements.

Admittedly, it’s a little fuzzy since it was a long time ago, but these games used to come with generic avatars and no actual names, so the only way to get around it was to download a third party patch and install it yourself. Not sure if that makes sense, and perhaps somebody can remind me of how it worked, but the way I remember it, if you wanted to load up 2007 West Virginia, for example, Pat White was just “player #5.” You could patch the game externally to make it say “Pat White” instead, but it was a workaround because of the NIL restrictions. You more or less had to download the rosters yourself and add them to the game if you wanted to see actual names and numbers.

Here’s the cover for 25: