University of Nevada, Las Vegas

UNLV managed to pull off one final, pleasant surprise this year by actually beating Cal in the L.A. Bowl. After the news that head coach Barry Odom left UNLV to take the head coaching job at Purdue, UNLV went from being a 4-ish point favorite to being an underdog in that game. Things started out shaky, with the offense having difficulty moving the ball in the first quarter. But the defense played well, and the offense eventually got its footing just enough to seal an 11-point victory.

Credit to interim coach Del Alexander, who kept the team focused, and called a pretty good game, including a masterful fake punt on a 4th and long inside UNLV's own 40 yard line! UNLV's scouts did their job and identified that Cal would be vulnerable to a play like that, and Alexander had the guts to call it in a completely surprising situation to steal all the momentum back in UNLV's favor.

This fake punt from UNLV was an example of masterful scouting and coaching!

In any case, I was pretty sour on the idea of the bowl game. I wasn't going to be able to attend the L.A. Bowl in person anyway, because it was in the middle of the week on a Wednesday, and I couldn't get the time off work, since I had already committed all of my remaining time off to the week between Christmas and New Year. But after Odom abandoned the team, and offensive coordinator Brennan Marion was snubbed for the head coaching promotion, I was kind of mad at both UNLV and the NCAA for allowing this collapse to happen. Though I did end up signing up for a 7-day free trial of Fubo in order to watch the bowl on TV, out of a sense of obligation.

Complete changing of the guard

Dan Mullen seems like a fine hire. He's had success in the SEC, which is the most difficult conference in college football. If a coach can win there, they can win anywhere.

I was really hoping for some consistency in terms of the team's identity. In that regard, I was rooting for Brennan Marion or defensive coordinator Mike Scherer to get the head coaching job. Marion's offense was as much a part of UNLV's recent success as Odom's head coaching was. And Scherer's defense was the best defense I've ever seen from this team. Odom, Marion, and Scherer successfully turned a perennial basement-dweller into a potential powerhouse that proved it could compete in a big boy conference like the Big 12. I wanted that identity to become fundamental to the team's DNA in the way that the Flexbone Triple Option is fundamental to the identity of the service academies. I wanted the Go-Go Offense to be "the UNLV offense" to the layman and casual college football fan. That success should have been rewarded by UNLV. Honestly, I thought that Marion would be a shoe-in.

But it seems like Marion may have some personality issues that make him difficult to work with. He may have been the one who promised NIL money to Matt Sluka, which the university couldn't actually afford to pay. I've read that he was almost fired for that. Maybe Odom wanted to fire him, but Harper over-ruled that decision, and maybe that's part of the reason why Odom seemed like he couldn't get out of Vegas fast enough. More generally, I've heard that Marion has a very abrasive personality, and that's not a good quality in a head coach.

Odom did not invite Marion to follow him to Purdue the way he invited Scherer. Instead, Marion is going to be the head coach of the Sacramento State Hornets in the Big Sky conference of the FCS. It doesn't seem like there were too many FBS schools banging down Marion's door to invite him to coach their teams. And maybe that is for very good reason. If that's the case, then the Sacramento State football team is a powder keg waiting to explode.

UNLV passed on OC Brennan Marion [LEFT] in favor of former SEC coach Dan Mullen.

So in summary, UNLV has lost is entire winning coaching staff, and it will be losing a majority of its starters to graduation (including a few potential NFL draftees). Ricky White, Jacob De Jesus, Jackson Woodard, Tiger Shanks, Jalen Catalon, Cameron Oliver, Hajj-Malik Williams, Jett Elad, and others will all be graduating, with White, Woodard, and Oliver having already declared for the NFL Draft. Some of UNLV's top recruits have also already switched their commitments to follow Odom to Purdue, and who knows how many under-classmen will follow suit and transfer to Purdue? Will Jaiden "Jet" Thomas still be a Rebel next year? Or Antonio Doyle? Or Fisher Camac?

Mullen will certainly have to do a lot of building through the transfer portal.

The NCAA needs to regulate in-season talent poaching!

This story is also bigger than just UNLV. The NCAA should really be paying close attention to what's going on here. You have a team that was 1-game away from making the inaugural College Football Playoff, and they had their head coach poached out from under them the week of a conference championship game. That should not be happening!

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University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The latest college football rankings were released on Sunday, following week 3 of the regular season. For the first time in school history, UNLV's football team was ranked in the Top 15 of the coaches' poll. This is something that I never thought would actually happen -- let alone that I would see it. My idea of a dream UNLV football season would be something along the lines of a 7 or 8-win season, bowl-eligibility, and maybe qualifying for the Mountain West Conference Championship game.

Even in my wildest dream, I didn't think I would ever see the team be Top-25 ranked.

For my entire life, this team has been a basement-dweller. 2 or 4-win seasons were the norm, and the occasional 5-win season would create false hope that maybe the team was on the verge of turning things around. The 2 bowl games that I had seen prior to the 2023 season represented what I thought would be the absolute height of what this team could possibly accomplish.

UNLV is ranked 25th in the nation after week 3.
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EA Sports College Football 25 - title

I felt like College Football 25 would be a real make-or-break title for EA Sports. Madden has been getting criticized for its focus on Ultimate Team, lack of attention to Franchise Mode, and myriad legacy issues that EA just refuse to address. The market has been jonesing for a licensed college football game -- in fact, it's been jonesing for any alternative to Madden. This is EA's chance to really put out a quality product that can earn it a lot of good faith to help carry it through the coming years of renewed football video game competition. I honestly expected that College Football 25 would hit a home run with its Dynasty Mode and feature set in order to earn back that trust and good faith -- especially after it was delayed a whole year from its original expected release.

Instead, I keep feeling disappointed and frustrated with College Football 25 at almost every turn. It feels, to me, like a pale shadow of its NCAA Football forebears. It's a mess of missing features, confounding control and interface issues, bad A.I. (especially on defense), and rosters that are muddled and obfuscated by the legal tightrope of name-and-likeness rights. It checks off almost all of the "must have" feature boxes (like adding the playoff and transfer portal), but this game seems to aggressively refuse to go above and beyond in any capacity.

Strap in and get comfortable. This is going to be a long review...

No-huddle gameplan

The launch version of College Football 25 is really friggin' hard! I started 0 for 7 against the CPU (on the All-American difficulty, with default sliders). I had to play a Boise State home match against lowly cupcake New Mexico in order to get my first victory. Since then, I've been doing a lot better, but victories do not typically come easily.

I have my share of responsibility in this. I don't know the playbooks yet, and I threw some facepalm-inducing interceptions. Linebackers seem to play a lot deeper in College Football 25 compared to Madden, and my QBs weren't putting enough touch on passes over the middle of the field. So Post and Dig routes that would be wide open in Madden were repeatedly being picked by lurking linebackers.

Lurking linebackers make a lot of interceptions between the hashes.

Despite my own mistakes, the designers of the game seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the barrier to entry would be as high as it could possibly be. The game doesn't seem to want to teach its new features, mechanics, or controls, and it insists on changing things just for the sake of change -- screw my decade (or longer) of muscle memory! Many problems that have long frustrated me in Madden reared their ugly heads to conspire against me as well. I often felt like I could call out exactly how an upcoming play would unfold before the snap, because I've seen all of this so many times in Madden.

Sacks and interceptions tended to come in pairs or triplets.

My star receivers refused to catch open downfield passes, while the CPU receivers all had hands of glue.

Force defenders refused to do their job, and my defense in general refused to contain the edge or take viable pursuit angles. Even if I expected an outside run and spread my line or linebackers, they'd still all crash inside and get smothered by down-blocks.

CPU receivers would repeatedly beat my DBs on in-breaking routes and break free for huge gains or scores, even though I explicitly set inside shade before the snap.

Outside shade was basically an invitation for the CPU to score on a post or quick slant, even if I had a single-high safety or robber to supposedly stop those specific routes.

My blockers would absolutely refuse to block the single most important assignment on the play whenever I needed a run play to be successful, even with elite running teams (such as Michigan).

My own big plays would consistently be called back by penalties.

The CPU teams would go into un-beatable "turbo mode" as soon as the 2-minute warning hit.

And so on, and so on. You've heard or read all of this before if you've looked at any review of Madden in the past decade or so.

CPU-controlled defenders take horrible containment and pursuit angles.

There was even a patch, released a couple days before this review was published, which was supposed to have improved pursuit angles. But in my limited play since the patch, it seems to have actually made pursuit even worse, somehow! Not only do players continue to take horrible containment angles, but any defender that happens to be in the open field on the perimeter, and in a position to stop an outside run, now has an infuriating habit of just bouncing off the ball-carrier. So perimeter tackles that were being made a week ago, are now being missed after the patch, giving up even more big runs and scores to the outside.

I cannot understate how much these poor pursuit and containment angles are ruining my enjoyment of this game! So many of my losses can be directly traced to my defense just completely shitting the bed and giving up big run after big run because they are completely unwilling to defend the perimeter. And there is little-to-nothing that I can do about this, because I can only control a single player on the defense at a time.

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Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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