Next year is going to be a big year for NCAA Football.

The BCS is going away, and a playoff will take over as the determinant of the nation's best college football team.

But how different will things be for my alma matter, UNLV? Well, they certainly won't be competing for a spot in those playoffs, and they probably weren't going to any bowls either. So the big question is: will they have a new head coach?

If you had asked me that question prior to the start of this year, I would have given an emphatic "Yes!".

Heck, I was ready to say "fire him" after last year's heartbreaking loss to Nevada

Bobby Hauck's first 3 years calling signals for UNLV has been less than satisfactory. Each year, the team has finished with a measly two wins, he hadn't won a single road game, and UNLV was prone to giving games away in the second half - even to teams that they should have beaten. The best thing that you could say about UNLV over the past 3 years is that they made some players on some division AA schools very happy! UNLV showed no improvement during those first three years, and in fact, the team seemed to be going backwards. Any hopes of a turnaround season were dashed by the third or fourth week of the season.

After the first five halves of football this season, it was looking like UNLV had fallen even deeper into a tailspin, and I had doubts that Hauck would last through the end of the season - let alone survive long enough to see the fancy new stadium be built.

It looks like there's going to be a lot of changes ahead for UNLV's football team. Early designs for a new domed football stadium near the UNLV campus have been floating around the internet for a few weeks, and news also recently broke that Timm Rosenbach has been hired as the team's new offensive coordinator.

In your face, Jerry Jones!

The stadium will be replacing decades-old Sam Boyd stadium (located in the outskirts of town near Henderson, NV), and is supposed to be built on-campus, near the Thomas & Mack Center, only a few blocks away from the Las Vegas strip. The stadium is going to have a retractable dome roof, a seating capacity of 60,000+, and a 100-yard wide video screen. That's right, this stadium is going to have a video screen running the entire length of the football field, effectively making a whole side of the stadium unsuitable for seating.

The designers and backers of the new stadium want a building that exhibits the uniqueness and flair of Las Vegas, and they think a massive video screen is the way to do it. I guess mounting video poker machines on the backs of everyone's seats wouldn't fly. I'm not terribly thrilled about the video screen idea. A dick-measuring contest with Jerry Jones isn't my idea of improving the football program, and I highly doubt that any video screen is going to attract higher-profile recruits to the program unless the team actually starts winning. Maybe we can use close-ups of the cheerleaders to distract the visiting team?

This review was originally published 07/30/2010 on Game Observer (now defunct). It has been republished here for archival purposes.

The game has nice ideas and looks great, but new gameplay mechanics only seem to create more bugs and problems.

EA really needs some competition in the football gaming market. I can’t imagine any football gaming fan NOT wanting the NCAA to discontinue EA’s NCAA football-exclusivity license when it expires either this year or next. [Update: EA has agreed to not sign another exclusivity agreement!] Comptetition is always good for the consumer, and right now, EA really isn’t giving us games that are up to par with our expectations. For the past two or three years, EA has given us NCAA football games that have contained some great new features and gameplay additions, but every year, they manage to fill the game with new flaws or take steps backwards in terms of gameplay.

Two years ago, excessive turnovers made the game almost unplayable. Last year, the oppressively fast game speed made the game look and feel so chaotic, that it almost completely overshadowed the improvements such as the “"Dead Duck" passes and the "Setup Play" feature. Like in past years, the new game gives us a lot of welcome improvements, but also introduces new problems and takes several steps backwards in certain areas.

With the football season nearing its finale and the college Bowl and NFL playoff pictures coming into focus, I thought I'd take a minute to reflect on EA's NCAA Football 13 and Madden NFL 13 and offer up my suggestions for next year's football games.

Table of Contents

• Gameplay suggestions
  • Universal physics, "Wasted Movement", and "Breaking Down"
  • Player awareness, and universal ball-seeking
  • Fix issues with putting players in motion
  • Double team pass blocking
  • Bring back the blocking play-art
  • Angled blocking
  • Make screens, draws, and play action passes work
  • Complete overhaul of special teams
• Other features
  • Adaptive AI
  • More game-preparation features
  • Wider variety of optional plays for custom playbooks
• Balance the game for full-length, 15-minute quarters
  • Game-managing AI teams
  • AI QBs that need to take some time to read the defense!
• Bring back the in-game save!

It seems pretty apparent that EA doesn’t give a damn about releasing the best product possible. They just want to milk it for all the money it’s worth. If they really cared about making NCAA Football ‘13 the best game it could be, then they would have delayed it a few weeks in order to install the same, potentially revolutionary, physics engine that is being implemented in this year’s Madden. The game releases six weeks prior to the start of the college football season anyway, so it wouldn’t have hurt to delay it a month. It still would have made it onto store shelves before the kickoff of the season. Heck, most teams haven’t even finalized their depth charts yet, and some are still revealing new uniforms and stadiums!

Table of Contents

• Reverting back to a broken foundation
• Passing is the focus of this year’s game
  • Psychic DBs seem to be gone … for now
  • My receiver never saw it coming
  • Issues that were unaddressed
• Controls have been obfuscated to accommodate a feature that isn’t even used in most game modes!
• New career modes and augments to Dynasty
  • Recruiting loses some mystery; remains the highlight of the game
  • Trying to capture that NFL 2K5 awesomeness, and not quite making it
• Maybe next year we’ll get the college football game we’ve been waiting for? Probably not.