The NCAA Football series became one of EA Sports’ annual sports franchise way back in 1993 under a different name, before taking on the NCAA Football title in 1997. Sadly, though one of EA Sports’ best sellers, the series came to an end in 2013 with NCAA Football 14 due to ongoing litigation, but one of the announcers that starred in the game for many years would like to see the game come back.
Kirk Herbstreit is one of the biggest announcers in all of sports, known as essentially the face of ESPN when it comes to college football. As a result, he was an easy choice to be part of the announcing crew in the NCAA Football series alongside names like Brad Nessler and Lee Corso.
During an interview with SEC Country back in November that was all about the upcoming NCAA Football playoffs at the time. At the time, they did not release his answer to that question, but now they have, and it sounds like he was as disappointed as us when the series got cancelled.
When asked if they were bringing the series back, Herbstreit responded with “It better,” while also saying “I can’t believe Ed O’Bannon took that game away from us. And hopefully we can get that fixed.” For those that don’t know O’Bannon is the player that started the whole litigation in the first place. Herbstreit also gave his idea on how to compensate players, though I think that might be a little bit too easy.
“Every single college football player. You know what they’d love for their compensation to be? Just give ‘em a free game. That’s the compensation that they would take. I’ve never met one player in college football that’s like: ‘They can’t use my name and likeness! I need to be paid!’ They’re just thrilled to be on the game. They love being on the game. It’s like the biggest highlight of their life, is to be on the game.”
To get NCAA Football revived, I’m pretty sure we’d need more than that, but with recent developments on playing being compensated in some ways, as well as some other ideas proposed, hopefully we can see a return to the NCAA Football series in a few years.
