Excited by the end of the NFL lockout, I just couldn't wait to get back to video game football. I purchased NCAA Football 12 last week, but haven't had much time to play it yet. But before I begin a Dynasty, I wanted to make sure that the rosters for my alma mater UNLV was as correct as I could make it.

I started with the rosters provided by Operation Sports user GamingTailgate. The guys at Operation Sports and Pasta Padre do a fantastic job with their rosters every year, and my hat's off to those guys for the tremendous work they do making sure that NCAA Football fans have accurate rosters for the new games as soon as possible. However, I noticed that they had made some glaring (but understandable) errors with the rosters for the UNLV Running Rebels.

UNLV isn't exactly a top-tier team. In fact, UNLV is a bottom-tier team. They only had two wins last year. So I'm sure that neither EA Sports nor Operation Sports cares too much about making sure the rosters are as up-to-date as possible for such a team. But I care, so I opened up the UNLV spring 2011 prospectus for reference.

Last Friday night, the Colbert Report aired the following Threat Down segment:

It's definitely not the first time that Colbert has has let out his inner geek. He's been known to talk about The Lord of the Rings, make Star Wars references, and show clips from video games. But this segment was probably his geekiest yet!

Comic books, video games, and Glee all in one Threat Down? He might as well have made "geekiness" be the one and only Threat in this particular ... um ... Down.

A federal judge denied the NFL's request for a stay on judge Susan Nelson's ruling to lift the lockout. This means that as of Friday, the 2011 NFL year will begin, and the league will go back to mostly business-as-usual while the NFL continues to attempt to appeal the decision.

With the NFL draft beginning later tonight, the Chicago Bears run for a victory in Super Bowl XLVI will begin!

Yesterday, I began an analsyis of the recently-released Madden NFL 12 teaser trailer. In it, I discussed four of the features showcased in the trailer (or at least, what I thought the features would be). My general conclusion in that section was that the only feature of any note is what appears to be a new player attribute and profiling system. Hopefully, the rest of the new features will provide something more interesting.

1. Section 5: Something about field goals...
2. Section 6: Probably not a blimp camera
3. Section 7: Custom playbooks are back
4. Section 8: Surprise onside kicks
5. Section 9: Hot and cold streaks
6. Section 10: 3-D grass
7. Conclusion, and how EA can earn my money this year

Last week, the first teaser trailer for Madden NFL 12 (why don't they just call it '2012'?) was released. Somehow, I managed to miss the initial release and didn't stumble onto the trailer until this weekend. But even though it's "old news" now, that isn't going to stop me from sharing my two cents.

First things first, here's the trailer in its entirety:

There's a lot of information in this trailer. A heck of a lot more than we got in the NCAA Football 2012 screenshot from a few weeks ago. Let's break it down!