No sport is marketed better than football in the USA. For 5 months out of the year, it dominates the sporting landscape to the point where labor talks and pre-season football beat out pennant race baseball for ESPN airtime. Somehow, both college football and professional football can coexist during the same time period and as complements instead of substitutes. Somehow, 7 months of football withdrawal sets up 5 months of football overload perfectly, and, though bowl ratings were down in 2010, they still drew great ratings for cable TV. Enough fans care solely about the unique college football experience that, if it’s present, they will turn out and cheer for the laundry, regardless of the players wearing the colors. Their loyalty is to the university and the pageantry first and foremost.

This is what EA banks on when they release NCAA and Madden within a month of each other every year. To their credit, they do a great job of replicating college stadiums and unique details. As an alum of the University of Illinois, I can say that EA modeled Memorial Stadium quite nicely, and the band erupts with “Oskee-wow-wow” (Yes, that’s the actual name of Illinois’ fight song) on every touchdown.

Some of the more well-known stadiums offer a home-field advantage that manifests itself by disrupting the UI: taking away icons for some of your receivers pre-play and shaking the screen, providing the player with less time and information to plan a successful play. The grass looks better, too, finally present in 3D instead of flat textures as we’ve seen in every EA Sports franchise for years. Quite literally, on the surface of the core game, it excels.

Unfortunately, that’s the best compliment I can give to NCAA Football 12. EA Tiburon has been able to reproduce that experience for years. The last game I played in the series was NCAA Football 07. Has it changed significantly since? The answer is a resounding no, at least not enough to justify an annual purchase for anyone other than the hardcore fans, those who live and die for their schools.

The gameplay is familiar EA football gameplay. I wish I had more to say about it, but I really don’t. The running game is better than the last time I played NCAA. A halfback can follow his blockers much better than in years past. Passing makes a player feel at the mercy of the overall stats, which is especially true in the college game, where schools can vary drastically in talent level. As this is college, option plays are selectable, but with the signature EA Sports suck-in effect of the animations, they don’t really seem that practical unless both a QB and an HB are very good and the defense isn’t.

The animations are probably the worst part of this game. For a company so focused on realism, I’m astounded that EA has allowed such an important aspect of its games to remain so stagnant. Players react so wildly inappropriately during plays that it’s enough to completely ruin suspension of disbelief. A player will turn to run upfield and will then stare backward at his own endzone, as if he wants to catch the eye of a hot dog vendor in the stands. When a player sheds a tackle, he may moonwalk for a few paces until he decides running in the same direction he’s facing might be a good idea. Players will routinely trip on the ground and superhumanly spring back up to make spectacular catches. My quarterback will celebrate like a linebacker who just made a goal-line stand if he makes a tackle after he’s picked off. This is not an aberration. These visual flubs happen every single game.

The single player modes further add to the lack of polish. The franchise’s coach-centered Dynasty Mode has added the ability to create new conferences, which is a nice touch and probably a necessity in today’s uncertain athletic landscape. It now sports what it calls a “Coaching Carousel,” where players can begin as offensive and defensive coordinators and focus only on that side of the ball in play-calling, switching jobs or getting promoted after each season. Those that enjoy a grinding aspect to their games will feel right at home, but it might almost be a better experience if a player tried to fail, which may prove difficult, since players are given choices of major universities from the start.

The biggest feather in NCAA Football 12’s cap is that its Dynasty Mode can now be played online. Though it would take a large amount of coordination and time, players can recruit and play against one another as coaches based on pre-determined rules by a commissioner. Following the NCAA schedule from week-to-week as offensive coordinators at one-star colleges could be an entertaining proposition, if only to see how long it takes to progress to a premier job. For players who really enjoy every aspect of NCAA football, this is a worthwhile addition to the series.

Unfortunately, recruiting in dynasty modes follows the Bioware romance formula: It’s just a matter of repeating the same formulaic interactions and talking to players enough to nab them. Not only is recruiting predictable and mundane, but it feels like a bad Turing Test. The answers don’t match up with the increase in the level of interest at all. A player who values television exposure “most” will say “Now that you mention it, I guess I’m starting to warm up to the idea of being on TV” when pitched a university’s prominence on television.

Road to Glory is NCAA’s other career mode, where players create a new athlete and control only that athlete during his stay in college. Like seemingly everything else, this mode is about quantity, not quality. Its most interesting feature is the ability to play both ways and be recruited from the start of high school. However, the experience here is bare-bones with a few generic high school stadiums. Unless a player performs terribly, he’ll have no trouble getting into any college he wants. Heck, if he doesn’t, he can just walk on and become the starting quarterback at the University of Texas within a few games. That was my backup plan in college, too!

The RPG aspects of this mode could have been interesting, but EA put almost no effort into the balance. It’s far too easy to do well in practice and in games. My quarterback was a 99 overall before his first year was over, and he was starting within two games. He was never in any risk of being challenged for his job. At that point, it’s just a matter of playing more games. There’s no strategy or entertainment value in this mode after the first half-season. It’s a grind, even if it’s less tedious than dynasty mode.

The peripheral aspects of this game are as average as they come. Commentary has never been a strong point of EA football games, but if they’re trying to provide an accurate ESPN college football experience, I can’t say the bland, repetitive commentary here is inaccurate. A humdrum pregame show precedes every game and shows each team entering the stadium, highlighting supposed impact players. In the menus, the game will play the same ESPN Radio highlight clip repeatedly and cut off prematurely, which seems to be a widespread issue based on the Googling I did. EA’s done this correctly in the past, so I don’t know how this slipped through.

The online features are what we’ve come to expect from EA. They still do a very good job with instant replay highlights, allowing players to upload them for others to view online. Even if a play isn’t a touchdown or turnover, it can be uploaded. Sadly, the only time I used this was to show my disbelieving friends how hilarious my players’ animations are.

Players can also upload teams and rosters and download other players. To my delight, I found several teams available from Eyeshield 21, though I’m sure I’m one of a handful who care. I chuckled when I saw that the top DE on the game leaderboards was named Barry Manilow. EA makes it very easy to search and find players and teams, and EA has thousands of team names in its audio database, which is a nice touch for the fans who want to see what Urban Dictionary entries slipped through the censors.

All this doesn’t make NCAA feel less of a Madden-lite. Perennial mistakes ravage what this game could be. It steps out of the box enough to make things seem interesting, but NCAA Football 12 needed a lot more refinement before any of these changes should have been attempted. I can only recommend this game to players that need a modern representation of the NCAA season every single year. For the rest, I doubt the previous year with new downloaded rosters wouldn’t work just as well.

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