Okay, so I’ve been digging into this whole NCAA 25 thing, and let me tell you, it’s a bit of a mess when it comes to figuring out which players aren’t in the game.
First, I started by looking at how the game itself handles finding players. It shows, like, the top 300 players or something, which is a lot, but not everyone. So, I thought, “Okay, maybe sorting by stars will help.” I tried sorting by just 4-star and especially 3-star recruits, figuring those guys might be less likely to be included compared to top-rated players. You see where I’m going with this? Like, how many players have been excluded? I think it may be a huge number.
Then there’s the whole mess with the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) players. Apparently, if a player is an NIL athlete, the only thing you can change in the game is their gear. Their appearance is restricted to physique such as height, weight, etc. For the players which are not the NIL athletes, things are still not that easy! For all players, you can’t touch stuff like their jersey number, their hometown, or their pipeline. And you can’t even mess with most of their appearance, except for, like, their height and weight. So that’s a big clue right there – if a player isn’t NIL, they might not be fully represented in the game.
So, I started thinking about the history of college football to see if there was a pattern. I found out that the Associated Press started their Top 25 college football poll way back in 1936. Since then, there have been 64 NCAA-recognized undefeated college football champions, including teams that shared titles. I figured maybe looking at those teams would give me an idea of which schools have historically had the most success, and maybe, just maybe, those teams would have more players in the game, thus the schools with fewer players in the game would be excluded.
- Notre Dame has the most undefeated, championship-winning seasons with six.
- Nebraska and Alabama are next with five each.
And then I remembered that the AP poll also ranks the top 25 NCAA teams in Division I sports, including football. So, I was thinking, “Okay, if a team is consistently ranked high, they probably have a lot of good players, right?” And maybe those are the players who are more likely to be in the game. Then I thought that if I could get the AP poll’s historical data, I could filter out the teams that were consistently on the list, and the rest of the teams might have players excluded.
The Process:
I spent hours going through this stuff. I cross-referenced the undefeated champions list with the AP poll rankings. I looked at historical rankings to see which teams were always up there. It was a lot of work, but it gave me a better idea of which players might be missing.
It’s not a perfect system, obviously. There are probably tons of great players out there who aren’t in NCAA 25 for one reason or another. But this was my way of trying to make sense of it all and figure out who got left out. It’s like trying to solve a giant puzzle without all the pieces. It is really hard to find out who is not on the list.
