With the January 2025 announcement of College Football 26 returning for the 2025 season, fans of the previous series were happy to see it back, but underlying the announcement was a long history of legal battles and complications.
EA’s College Football Game Had Humble Beginnings in 1993
In 1993, Electronic Arts (EA) announced the game’s release as a counterpart to the company’s popular Madden NFL Game.
It was known as Bill Walsh’s College Football, paying homage to the coach who coached the Stanford Cardinals and won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s.
In 1998, EA acquired the licensing rights to the NCAA name, changing to NCAA Football 98.
According to a Sports Illustrated article written by Kevin Sweeney, Ed O’Bannon led an antitrust class-action lawsuit against the NCAA that named EA Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) as co-defendants, arguing that the NCAA was wrongfully using athletes’ images commercially.
Players were featured with identical measurements to real-life players in NCAA sports and things like skin tone, all without naming the players or with their consent.
The 40 million dollar settlement between EA, the Collegiate Licensing Company and O’Bannon resulted in players being compensated, and EA agreed to work with and play players accordingly.
The NCAA did not want players to profit this way, so EA decided in 2013 to stop making the game.
The NCAA’s co-legal counsel, Steve Berman, said at the time that “Students agreed that by being student-athletes, they could not exploit their personal commercial value, an agreement they lived up to. The same cannot be said about the NCAA or its partner Electronic Arts.”
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The CLC and EA agree to a licensing extension through 2017. Still, the three NCAA football conferences and the above-mentioned statement from the NCAA’s legal counsel led to the game’s demise.
With the change to NIL likeness requirements in 2021, EA began planning the game’s return and made further announcements in 2023.
The game will be released again in July 2024 as EA Sports College Football 25, featuring 134 schools.
Players were given $600 and a copy of the game in return for use of their name, image, and likeness.
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