It Is A Horrendous Decision By EA Sports College Football 25 to Have Road To Glory Mode Start in College
The release of EA Sports College Football 25 is less than 2 months away. It'll be the first college football video game to hit the market since NCAA 14. The hype is enormous. Expectations couldn't be higher. Even I, a 32-year old man who hasn't touched a console since he graduated college, will be buying a brand new system for the sole purpose of playing this game.
Reviews from people who have been lucky enough to test out the game ahead of time have been trickling in one by one. Everything I've seen thus far has been encouraging. I have no idea if the people writing these reviews are people who's opinions should be trusted, but if I'm taking them at face value, I have to think we've got a pretty damn good college football game coming our way.
But there is one thing I'm not thrilled about. Apparently, College Football 25's highly anticipated 'Road To Glory' mode, where you take control of a single player and lead him through his career, has nixed the best part of the journey. In the past, your Road To Glory started with your player as high school senior. It was awesome. I'd create dual threat QB John Rich of the Bowling Green Bobcats. I'd customize my whole schedule so that I would play against all the Northern Lakes League teams I grew up competing against in real life. It was so awesome that half the time once my high school season was over and it was time to play college ball, I would just start a whole new Road To Glory so I could play another year of high school. It was truly the best part of the game.
But for some reason... according to sources... in College Football 25, Road To Glory will start with your Freshman year of college.
R. Kelly echoes my sentiment. That's a miss. A huge miss. I can't fathom how the brilliant minds over at EA Sports would think removing that aspect of the game is a good idea. If anything, they should add MORE build up. Instead of playing just your senior year of high school, they should let you play a whole 4 years. Honestly, they could go back even further than that. If I had things my way, I'd dial it wayyy way back.
Hear me out. It's your senior year of college. Your Road To Glory character hasn't even been born yet. You're playing as his future dad. The game doesn't even start with football. It starts with you at the bar. It's closing time. You're 12 drinks deep, and it's time to make your move. There are 3 girls who have your attention:
(A) The sturdy 6'2", nothing-to-write-home-about-face-wise-but-also-nothing-to-be-ashamed-of, All-Conference volleyball player
(X) The short, skinny, busty, god-damn-she's-hot, ass-chiseled-by-Jesus-Christ-himself sorority chick who always has stomach problems
(Y) Wheelchair girl
Once you choose your lucky lady, you escort her back to your apartment where you're presented with another choice
(A) Have unprotected sex
(X) Make out for an hour and do some clothes-on hand stuff then stay up all night talking about your feelings.
You choices will determine what type of kid you'll have. For example, if you have unprotected sex with the the volleyball player, you'll end up with a great athlete, but the two of you will never last as a couple. You'll end up going through a nasty custody battle that will deeply affect your child's mental state. His awareness will be shit, he'll be difficult to coach, he'll likely end up at a house party where some shit goes down that he may or may have been involved in. It will result in him missing a couple regular season games, but in the end the charges are dropped and people forget about the whole thing a few weeks later, etc.
If you have sex with the sorority girl the first night, you're probably gonna end up with a stinker. But on the bright side you'll get to see some pretty sweet AI tits, which are nearly indistinguishable from real tits nowadays. So that's pretty neat.
The secret will be to take home the wheelchair girl and stay up talking. At the end of the night she confides in you that she lost the use of her legs in a plane crash while on the way to watch her father compete in the decathlon at the 2012 London Olympics. Jackpot. You fall in love with her despite her terribly inconvenient disability. The two of you get married and have a kid with the genes of an Olympian who's raised by a mother that spent her whole life overcoming adversity. It couldn't be a more ideal situation.
Note: Keep in mind no matter which woman you choose, there's a 50% chance she ends up having a girl. That won't necessarily stop the game, but it will make things much more difficult. She'll likely star in flag football since girls hit puberty sooner than boys, but once the guys catch up you'll be forced to switch to kicker. Best case scenario you walk-on to Vanderbilt and end up kicking a few extra points and a pointless squib kick as a PR stunt. But at least you'll get a 4-minute segment on Sportscenter.
Once you have your kid, the game fast forwards 9 years. They come home from school one day with a flier for youth tackle football. He's begging to play. All of the cool kids are doing it. You're all about it, but your crippled wife is staunchly against the idea. She just watched the Aaron Hernandez documentary like a week ago.
"I don't care if he turns out gay but I don't want my son to grow up to be a murderer.", she says.
You then have to decide whether to let you child play tackle football at 9-years old, or if he'll have to play flag football first. As soon as you make your choice the perspective of the game changes. You are now in control of the kid. The rest of your career is in your hands. You'll have all sorts of choices to make throughout your formative years.
(A) He/him
(X) She/her
(Y) They/them
(A) Focus on one position
(X) Play a little bit of everything
(A) Play on your local team with your friends and be the star player
(X) Join the more prestigious City League where the competition is greater but you run the risk of getting lost in the shuffle
(A) Get a ride home from football camp with your friend's mom like you had originally planned
(X) Spend the night in the defensive coordinator's basement because he promised you that come recruiting time Penn State will give you an extra look
(A) Tell your parents + press charges
(X) Bury it deep down inside and use it as fuel to become a monster on the gridiron
Several lengthy seasons of youth football, and hundreds of life altering decisions later, it'll finally be time to choose a high school. Which could be a whole ass thing in it's own right. Do you attend your public high school and be the hometown hero, or abandoned your lifelong friends and go to the evil Catholic School across town who's won state 4 out of the last 5 seasons? Or do you skip town entirely and force your parents into debilitating levels of debt so you can attend some crazy fake-life school like IMG Academy?
I could go on forever, but you get the picture. Road To Glory mode is far too rich with possibility for them to simply start you off in college. We'll be missing out on the recruiting process entirely. I want to work my way up from 1-star to 5-star, gradually climb the Rivals recruiting ranks, receive offers from various different schools, cut handshake deals with shady boosters who promise that their car dealership will cut me a million dollar check for every touchdown pass I throw.
And picture this. At the end of your college career, you find yourself celebrating with your teammates at your favorite college bar one last time. What an incredible journey you've been on. After responsibly throwing back a couple cases of Vegan High Noon Spiked Milk's (or whatever Dave's selling at that point), the song Closing Time rings across the bar. You look up and there's whole sea of girls making eyes at you. You carefully choose which one you'll be taking back to your $2.5 million dollar home paid for by NIL deals + money from the football camp lawsuit. You sire a kid and Road To Glory starts all over again. It's an ever ending cycle. You can play as generations of players. Maybe you could even have multiple kids at the same time and play 2 careers at once. Create the greatest football family in the history of football. God damn it EA Sports! That's how you do Road To Glory mode.