Michael Rothstein is a reporter for NFL Nation at ESPN. Rothstein covers the Atlanta Falcons. You can follow him via Twitter @MikeRothstein.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Daryl Holt shopped at a Books-A-Million near Auburn, Alabama, around Thanksgiving in 2019 when his clothes caught the attention of the person standing behind the counter. The EA Sports logo Holt wore led to the question he always received when wearing his company’s gear publicly.
When is the college football video game coming back?
Holt smiled. It had always been a desire to bring back the college football video game, but at that moment Holt knew something no one else outside the EA Sports offices in Central Florida did. When he returned from his trip, he had another conversation ready to potentially solve concerns and bring back one of the most resonant titles in the company’s catalog.
“I think I even said, ‘I don’t know, but maybe sooner than you think,'” Holt said. “And it kind of gave me that little extra push that I know that there were people that wanted this game to come back as much as I did, more so than I did.”
Holt, now the senior vice president and group general manager of EA Sports, understood the concerns and questions his bosses might have when he pitched the potential return of EA Sports College Football in December 2019. He was ready for all of them when he stepped into a half-hour meeting with EA Sports president Cam Weber’s offices at the company’s former facility in Maitland, Florida.
Holt reframed how the company looked at the college football game — one which EA Sports stopped making in 2013 in part due to a lawsuit from former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon surrounding name, image and likeness rights. NIL was still an unknown. So were logistics of reviving a franchise dormant for, at that point, more than six years. At one point during the meeting — Holt wouldn’t say how other than it was a creative solution the company ended up not needing — Holt knew he had done it. Unofficially, EA was going to bring back college football.
It would be over a year, in February 2021, before EA Sports publicly announced the eventual return of the game. By then, EA Sports started assembling — and in some cases reuniting — the development staff. It took another three years to bring the game to market this upcoming July 19.
What happened between? Building a game from scratch, inventing technologies, reining in overambition and creating a foundational game for a returned year-to-year franchise. They collected assets from all 134 schools, packing in as much as they could. They navigated having — and paying — actual college football players in the game thanks to current NIL rules. They added components of NIL in the game along with the transfer portal.
If they needed a reminder of their mission, they didn’t need to look far. On the wall of the college football development cluster at the EA Sports offices is a long banner with former Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson and the EA Sports NCAA Football 14 cover. It’s the last time the game was produced. They walk by it every day.
It led to a motivational mantra which kept focus and the need for authenticity in their aims.
“Every school is somebody’s favorite school,” Holt said. “Became kind of a rallying cry for us as a dev team.”
TICKET STUBS LINE the back of Ben Haumiller’s office on the third floor of EA Sports’ Orlando headquarters. There’s Florida State gear everywhere, too. Years ago, Haumiller was a college student at Florida State. He played in EA Sports’ competition to find the best college football video game player in America.
He lost in the tournament in 1999, but it led to a job as a quality verification tester with the company and eventually as a designer and producer on the old version of NCAA Football. The game went away after the O’Bannon lawsuit, and Haumiller transferred to different areas of the company. Like many of his colleagues, Haumiller hoped for College Football’s return.
EA Sports licensed a small number of schools as part of a college storyline in single-player mode for Madden ’18 and Madden ’20. Haumiller said putting college teams into the company’s popular NFL franchise was a way to get universities comfortable with EA Sports again.
Then Holt made his pitch. The game was greenlit and hiring began.
“The opportunity came to come back on the development side,” Haumiller said. “So I made that jump and came back to help get us on solid footing and where we go on this rebirth.”
It was the game Haumiller, now the principal game designer for College Football, always wanted to work on.
Rob Jones, the senior production director of College Football, was Holt’s first hire. A devout Michigan fan with memorabilia all over his office, Jones returned to EA in 2020 from 2K Sports, where he worked as a producer on the NBA 2K series for most of the 2000s and 2010s and helped launch the company’s College Hoops series as the game’s first producer. Together, he and Holt started building the college football team.
Holt said it was the easiest team he’s built in his time at EA Sports because there were existing employees across the company and new hires who wanted to bring back college football. There was reverence for the game inside and outside the building. The dedication and passion were clear to Holt early on. Every conversation of the game became a debate of what might work best.
The passion for colleges is clear throughout the college football cubicles, where almost all have some marker of college football fandom.
With the team largely built, they needed to figure out how to make a game centered around authenticity. That meant everything: stadiums, rosters, mascots and crowds.
The team created a pageantry database, which became a rolling list of traditions and idiosyncrasies for all 134 FBS programs. They asked schools for help, added what they knew from their own college football fandoms and even scoured fan forums to find things they may have missed — or to learn that a school no longer did tradition X or hand signal Y.
Production director Christian McLeod said every school had to have something. Not every tradition or chant or hand signal ended up in this year’s game, but they wanted something for everyone.
“We want to make sure that, again, everybody’s team is somebody’s favorite,” McLeod said. “Texas and Texas State need to feel the same when you’re playing as them if you’re a fan of that school.”
Building this took time. In all, EA Sports received tens of thousands of assets from schools in addition to their own work. They asked for and compiled touchdown celebrations for each team and stadium, how players celebrate after turnovers, how teams run out of tunnels, crowd hand signals, chants on key downs and details for stadiums, mascots, cheerleaders and uniforms.
Once received and researched, they had to figure out how to build them.
THERE WERE SOME helpful things for the team at the start. Some stadiums — including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for the SEC championship and USC’s home field, the Los Angeles Coliseum, from when the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams played games there — could be taken from Madden and repainted for whatever uses necessary.
But the majority of the almost 150 stadiums in the game had to be built from scratch. Even though the Frostbite engine is the same as Madden, what the college football team needed to do was much different — one of the many reasons EA Sports insists it won’t look or feel the same as the Madden series.
At one point, developers went to Holt and said they weren’t sure if they could get every stadium done in an authentic manner. It was a lot of space and capability. Both Holt and the development team knew the answer — 50 wasn’t going to cut it. They needed all 134.
As the team started construction, they began to look at innovative ways to solve problems and tech they could borrow from other EA games or create themselves. McLeod said they realized they needed a new lighting system in the game to create the scale they needed — Global Illumination Based on Surfels, or what they commonly call GIBS. GIBS is a dynamic, real-time lighting system that helps create different atmospheres in the stadium for a noon game, a 3:30 game or a night game, including how light might refract off helmets.
With GIBS in place, the team created a Stadium Toolkit, which McLeod said allowed designers and developers to almost go brick by brick, section by section to recreate stadiums to make sure the color schemes were correct down to the individual railings, tunnels and walls. It almost, McLeod said, became like a virtual Lego set putting it all together.
While there were some pieces from NCAA Football 14 they could use, those stadiums and mascots were built on a different engine for a different console. Not much would translate, so they had to start from the beginning.
Building an empty stadium took about a week depending on the venue, with Syracuse’s JMA Wireless Dome among the trickiest because it was indoors and cavernous, so lighting had to be set up a bit differently than other schools. McLeod called it “the perfect storm of stadiums.”
Understanding the crowd’s importance to college football, McLeod said he knew they had to “make sure that crowd looks amazing.” Are the bands in the right place? The visitor sections? The patterns some schools have within their crowds — think Tennessee’s Checkerboard and Penn State’s White Out games. The design team entered the empty virtual stadium and tagged where everything would be, a process taking multiple weeks.
There were some concessions needed to make sure the game still performed well, which is where the JMA Wireless Dome and its unique architecture helped. As the team tested everything from equipment pieces to plays, they put it in the Dome to check for performance and make sure the frame rates didn’t slow down.
There were small things in stadiums which held import, too. For McLeod, a diehard Michigan State fan, it came from Arkansas State, where there is a waterfall in the stadium and when the Red Wolves score a touchdown, fountains go off.
“That was one of those things that was a stretch goal for us to get in,” McLeod said. “And to see it actually manifest itself in the product. I’m so proud of the team to see that.”
MASCOTS — NOT ALL will make this year’s game — were another struggle point. One of the hardest things for the development team to create were four-legged friends like Texas’ Bevo (a longhorn steer) or Colorado’s Ralphie (a buffalo).
They had to develop new animation rigs different from those for players, coaches or fans because of four legs versus two.
McLeod said they created four different rigs for dogs, one for cows and one for Ralphie. Bevo was one of the first the team built because it proved they could do it.
Ralphie took the longest, about a month from start to finish, McLeod said.
“It’s the actual animation,” McLeod said. “It’s to make sure that Ralphie runs fluidly. We call them quadrupeds, right? A human on two legs has a totally different mocap rig or animation rig than an animal on four.”
Then there’s leg spans and strides and weight within the movement. McLeod said they knew that when they started. Like the stadiums, McLeod said shipping a game without Ralphie and Bevo “was not acceptable to us.”
While part of the team built out stadiums and mascots, another focused on game play with the same intent as everyone else — College Football would not look or play like Madden.
So playbooks matter. Game speed matters. Jones said they had to push the boundaries of what was possible. They had to have 134 specific playbooks, received help from their access to Pro Football Focus and had conversations with those within the game to help understand what styles teams run.
There were base plays and concepts they could use, but the key was playbook individuality. They wanted players to feel like they were playing as Tennessee or Michigan.
THE MOST SURPRISING thing came not from something they created or a hurdle they faced, but rather from what happened after they announced the name, image and likeness plan for athletes. Any athlete opting into the game who ends up being used in one of the 85 roster spots per team will receive a free copy of EA Sports College Football along with $600 with the option of remaining in the game yearly as long as the player has eligibility. There are also separate NIL deals made with athletes who could serve as ambassadors or cover athletes like Michigan’s Donovan Edwards, Colorado’s Travis Hunter and Texas’ Quinn Ewers.
EA Sports thought they’d get 7,000 or 8,000 players the first week. Eight days in, 10,000 players had agreed to be in the game. At present, more than 13,000 players have opted in.
“We were pleasantly surprised,” Jones said. “By the enthusiasm with which people were coming in.”
Not all of them will end up making it into the game due to the 85-person roster limit, but it’s still a large undertaking.
EA staffers created a system they call “Generic Plus,” developed by the art department. It takes about two to three hours to construct a player’s face in the game. EA does this by taking a reference photo of a player — think a passport photo or team headshot — and machine learning then creates an image of what the player looks like.
EA staffers then go in and make tweaks on what the machine missed or didn’t accurately portray, from hair to eyebrows to eyes, which could take 10 to 15 minutes. McLeod said if animators had to do the entire process, it might take a day per player, which was not an option.
“It was just a brand new way,” McLeod said.
Holt said the player raters for Madden have assisted with the ratings for college football players, but declined to go into specific detail.
When a player is in the game, there will be multiple uniform options. Each team will have at least a home and away jersey and, if an alternate jersey exists, at least one alternate. Some schools will have more than that and McLeod said after launch, they could end up adding more jersey options. Like everything else, uniform specifications came from a combination of school information and the research of EA’s staff.
WHILE THE GAME was being created on-site, EA Sports had to get announcer tracks recorded, featuring multiple broadcast teams including one led by ESPN’S Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit. Fowler said on Instagram he taped more than 115 hours of commentary over a two-year process.
Some of the sessions were done separately. Some were done together with the broadcast crews. Almost all had someone from EA on Zoom helping the process. Fowler said on Instagram he did calls of everything from touchdowns for every team — which took an hour to go through every team in the game — to a team punting on second down.
Jones said there was a baseline of calls they needed from both crews and a list of situations they needed. Both sets of commentary teams had to cover the entire game.
“It was a lot of writing scripts, but then eventually what starts happening is in order to get the best performance out of them, you have to let ’em ad-lib,” Jones said. “You kind of need to let them know what the situation is so that you can actually get the right amount of back-and-forth between them.”
As they maneuvered through the two-year process, the commentary became more comfortable and what you’d typically see from the crews during real games. The toughest thing, Jones said, was working around the broadcaster’s commitments.
In all, there are hundreds of hours of sound in the game. Different sounds will be triggered by events, Jones said, put in place by one of his team’s software engineers, Rick Mancuso, to make it all flow seamlessly. Mancuso was also in charge of adding the small sounds for schools in the game, like a “Let’s Go Blue” chant at Michigan.
THERE IS CLEAR excitement throughout the EA Sports College Football team. You hear it in the way they talk about the game and how they all stress the same thing: Authenticity is the foundation.
This isn’t a one-off. What they build for this year they’ll be able to add to and tweak in iterations to come.
They know they couldn’t get everything they wanted in this version. A combination of time and capacity wouldn’t allow it. There’s already a list — some from the pageantry database, some from ideas they couldn’t quite reach — of what they’d like to add in next year’s game.
They also recognize this: Four years after Holt went into Weber’s office and three years after announcing the game, college football is back. And here to stay.
“I would definitely put it, in terms of my 20 years with EA Sports, as one of those big achievement moments,” Holt said. “In terms of saying how do we not let scale or let a problem deter, derail or stop us.
“That’s the key for this team is they didn’t take no for an answer.”
Dan Wetzel is a senior writer focused on investigative reporting, news analysis and feature storytelling.
It once seemed improbable that the most compelling figure of the college football offseason would be Bill Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend, but somehow, here we are.
Jordon Hudson’s spot in Belichick’s life has always been a public talking point. After all, they started dating two years ago, when Belichick was 71. Of late, though, she’s become an obsession.
Belichick is arguably the greatest coach in the history of the sport, winner of six Super Bowls leading the New England Patriots. His jump to the college ranks and the University of North Carolina is, for purely football reasons, of great intrigue.
Would this work? Could this work?
Currently though, the focus is on Hudson, who takes an active role in managing Belichick’s affairs, including running point on publicity for his new book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football.”
That includes a viral clip from a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview when Hudson shut down a question about how the two met and was deemed a “constant presence.” That led to all sorts of attention on the relationship, not to mention Belichick’s acuity and Hudson’s recent real estate holdings. Former Patriots great Ted Johnson even told WEEI radio in Boston that “the Tar Heels should consider firing Bill Belichick.”
A few days into this modern controversy, where a social media clip redefines someone with decades in the public eye, can we all settle down for a moment?
As with any relationship, only Belichick and Hudson are privy to what is transpiring between them. But as sensationalistic as all the TikTok comments and website stories currently are, when it comes to actually coaching a football team, let’s settle back on one undeniable truth.
This is Bill Belichick.
Sure, the current attention can be fairly labeled as the kind of “distraction” that might personally crush and professionally derail most people. Belichick is not most people.
“Never been too worried about what everyone else thinks,” Belichick told CBS.
If you allow his history — a lesson from his life in football, if you will — to inform, then you would know that there has rarely, if ever, been any personal feud, situation, tabloid headline or bit of accusational strife that has derailed the man’s single-minded focus on winning.
Belichick doesn’t just thrive in the briar patch of controversy — he seems to prefer it. The more external noise, the better.
A former player standing trial for murder? Win the Super Bowl.
Accused of illegally videotaping opponents? Post a 16-0 season.
A star quarterback alleged to have cheated to win the AFC Championship Game by deflating footballs? Name-drop “My Cousin Vinny” in a news conference, then win the Super Bowl.
Have the team get fined and stripped of a first-round draft pick and the quarterback suspended for the start of the season? Win another Super Bowl.
Maybe this isn’t what he was expecting from the book release, but let’s be clear, he was expecting to create a major media stir.
Belichick is famously passive-aggressive. When he never once mentioned Patriots owner Robert Kraft in his memoir — not even in the acknowledgments — he did so expecting a commotion. This was likely to make it clear that Belichick believed the Patriots’ success during their 24 years together was more based on the coaches and players than the very front-facing owner who, depending whose version you believe, fired Belichick in January 2024.
This was throwing red meat to the sports media machine. It just turned out that the Hudson situation represented even more red meat to the far larger American pop culture/social media machine.
Belichick might not have seen this coming, but this is how he has always operated. He welcomes speculation and even being painted as the villain. Even his closest confidants, from Bill Parcells to Tom Brady, often wind up in prolonged, public ice-outs. There are the endless scraps with the media, the league office, officials or other coaches.
The public questioning his actions and motivation? Please.
Consider that back nearly two decades ago, the NFL made a deal with Reebok for its coaches to wear approved clothes. Belichick bristled at being told what to wear. In an act of fashion defiance, both Patriots and Belichick sources say, he took a plain gray sweatshirt and cut off the sleeves to make it ugly. (It inadvertently became a huge seller, labeled the “BB Hoodie” in the Patriots Pro Shop.)
Or when, in an effort to protest the NFL making teams categorize player injuries — doubtful, questionable, etc. — Belichick began listing Brady as “probable” on the report with a shoulder injury week after week for years despite there being no known injury. Brady would just laugh when asked about it.
Or when he thought the NFL was getting too commercialized, so he refused to have his name used by EA Sports in the Madden video game — “NE Coach” was all that was listed — even though he would make money for literally doing nothing.
Or maybe consider in 2000, when he reversed course on accepting the head coaching job with the New York Jets. Rather than get all apologetic, he handwrote a note that read: “I resign as HC of the NYJ.”
He loves this stuff. Like many highly competitive people, finding an enemy, or some doubt, or some negative opinion about him seemingly feeds him. It certainly doesn’t cause him to wilt.
The current kerfuffle isn’t much different from past ones. He’s been through divorce, and his dating life was even fodder for the New York tabloids. It didn’t matter. He just kept winning.
All of that makes it unlikely that Hudson is somehow bossing Belichick around — or that she would even want to. This is just BB.
Whatever happens with the couple — we wish them the best — is one thing, but anyone who thinks Belichick is somehow incapable of weathering some gossip or jokes, or won’t be laser-focused on coaching, teaching and preparing his players, hasn’t been paying attention.
Here’s guessing Belichick will be fine. He always has been.
For months, Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney had joked with Ian Schieffelin that the 6-foot-8 power forward for the Tigers‘ men’s basketball team would make an excellent tight end, but Schieffelin assumed it was all in good fun. Two weeks ago, however, he got a call from Swinney with a serious offer: spend the next six months with the Tigers football team and see what happens.
Schieffelin announced on Instagram on Friday that he is taking Swinney up on the offer, forgoing any pro basketball prospects for now in favor of one last season in a Clemson jersey — this time on the gridiron instead of the hardwood.
“I’ve been just training for basketball, getting ready for the next level,” Schieffelin told ESPN. “Dabo just walked me through the opportunity he was willing to give me, and it all sounded great, something I wanted to jump on. It really just sparked my interest in wanting to try, and being able to put on a Clemson jersey again was very enticing to me. To be able to be coached by Dabo and [tight ends coach Kyle] Richardson is just a huge opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
Schieffelin blossomed into one of the key cogs for the Tigers’ hoops team the past two years. He averaged 12.4 points and 9.4 rebounds per game last season as Clemson earned a 5-seed in the NCAA tournament, losing to McNeese in the first round.
He had entered the transfer portal last month hoping for a fifth year of eligibility amid several ongoing lawsuits against the NCAA, though Schieffelin said the likelihood of an outcome in time for him to play basketball in 2025-26 was slim. He had been preparing for a crack at the pros — likely overseas or in the G League — when Swinney called with the offer.
“I’d never rule out me going back to basketball,” Schieffelin said. “I’ll see how these next six months go, see how development goes, see if I really like playing football. But I think this is a good opportunity for the next six months.”
Clemson lost starting tight end Jake Briningstool after last season. Briningstool, who signed as an undrafted free agent with the Kansas City Chiefs last week, played in 48 games and made 127 catches over four years at Clemson. The Tigers’ depth chart at the position is thin on experience, with Josh Sapp (13 catches), Olsen Patt-Henry (12 catches) and Banks Pope (1 catch) the only tight ends on the team to have recorded a reception.
In October, Swinney teased his interest in adding Schieffelin to his roster, suggesting he would fit in nearly anywhere on the field for the Tigers.
“He could play tight end, D-end. He could play whatever he wanted to play. He’d be an unbelievable left tackle,” Swinney said. “I’ll definitely have a spot. We have a lot of rev share ready too if he wants to pass up wherever he’s going [after basketball].”
Schieffelin said he hadn’t taken Swinney’s suggestions seriously during basketball season, assuming the coach was just teasing, but when the opportunity became real, he quickly understood the vision Swinney had for him.
“The call two weeks ago was very serious,” Schieffelin said, “and I thought, maybe it’s an opportunity to stay around a little longer and join a national championship contender.”
Schieffelin said he is not expecting to earn serious NIL money but does think his body type could allow him to blossom into a potential NFL prospect.
He played quarterback as a ninth grader before opting to focus on basketball the following year. Schieffelin said he will spend the next few months working on conditioning and strength gains to prepare for the rigors of football as well as working to build relationships with his new teammates, but he said he doesn’t have any set expectations for the season.
“Playing college basketball for four years, I’m used to the grind and used to work,” Schieffelin said. “But it looks different on the football side, so just getting in the weight room and learning everything.”
Before making his decision, Schieffelin said he spoke with Colts tight end Mo Alie-Cox, who was a four-year starter in basketball for VCU before signing with Indianapolis. Alie-Cox hadn’t played football since his freshman year of high school but is now entering his eighth NFL season.
“We talked about what went into his decision to go the football route,” Schieffelin said. “He helped me just knowing why he decided, and it made me decide to just give it a chance and see where I could take it.”
Alie-Cox is one of a handful of basketball players who have made a successful transition to football. Greg Paulus played hoops at Duke before becoming the starting quarterback at Syracuse in 2009. Jimmy Graham and Julius Peppers played both sports in college before becoming All-Pro NFL players. Antonio Gates played basketball at Kent State before giving football a try. He was announced as a Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee in February.
“Just being able to compete with these guys and impact the team any way I can,” Schieffelin said of his goals. “I’m going into this very optimistic and ready to learn. Being able to compete every day is something I enjoy. To learn football and have fun.
“Maybe I’ll be really good, maybe I’ll be really bad. It’s something that was worth a shot. And being able to put a Clemson jersey on again is really special to me, and to do it this time in Death Valley is going to be amazing.”
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
Chisholm had been scheduled to undergo an MRI in New York on Thursday, an off day for the Yankees. The move is retroactive to April 30. Infielder Jorbit Vivas was recalled from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to replace Chisholm on the active roster.
Chisholm, 27, is batting .181 with seven home runs and a .714 OPS in 30 games; 10 of his 19 hits have been for extra bases. He has been a plus defender in his return to second base this season, his original position in the majors, after primarily playing center field for the Miami Marlins and third base for the Yankees last season.
Vivas, 24, has yet to make his major league debut. The Yankees called him up in late April, but he was sent back to Triple A three days later without appearing in a game.
Vivas is batting .319 with two home runs, an .862 OPS and 15 walks to eight strikeouts splitting time between second base and third base in the minors this season. The Yankees acquired him, alongside left-hander Victor Gonzalez, from the Los Angeles Dodgers for prospect Trey Sweeney in December 2023.