Supreme Court Ruling Means EA Sports’ College Football May Very Well Feature the Likenesses of Real Players

When EA Sports announced earlier this year that it was bringing back the long dormant College Football series, there were many questions—the most notable one being “how?” The series went dormant in 2013 as a result of the original 2009 lawsuit filed over NCAA athletes’ ability to profit off of their likeness. While the developers originally intended to use customized characters in lieu of actual players, that plan might be changing as a result of the Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday that the NCAA can’t prohibit players from profiting off of their likenesses.

EA Sports released a statement to Axios on Thursday indicating that they may be adjusting their plans as a result of the NCAA finally allowing players to accept endorsements and profit off their name, image and likeness. “We are watching the recent developments regarding student-athlete name, image and likeness very closely,” a company rep told Axios. “It’s still very early stages at this point, and we plan to explore the possibility of including players in ‘EA Sports College Football.’”

When the game was announced in February, the company said that while it had obtained licenses to use over 100 schools in the Football Bowl subdivision, it was going to use randomly generated players and numbers to fill out the teams. The game is also set to feature a toolkit that would allow users to create their own players, more or less giving you an unofficial way to include your favorite college football athletes.

I can’t imagine that they’re still going to go down that route now that they can just straight up use the players. EA Sports has previously said the game isn’t coming out any earlier than summer 2022 and given how long fans of college football have been waiting for this game, I’m sure they won’t mind waiting a little bit longer if it means they can actually ball out with some of their favorite athletes.

Now, let’s just hope that this game manages to be better than what’s become of the Madden series lately .