EA Sports REVEALS More EPIC News for Deion Sanders | News Colorado Football COMMITMENT!

I don’t mean to be a downer, but EA’s decisions have everything more to do with 🤑 and showing the currently-semi-rabid fans of Colorado—who were 100 times more interested, last year at this time—a bit of love. Don’t get me wrong, I think we’re gonna whoop some ass, back in the Big XII, but if not in a New Year’s Six game, at least, the interest and the rankings will fall down considerably. Tied for fifth and listed at eighth was a strategic decision by EA, keeping CU in the mix but not committing.

I did my undergrad and master’s at Penn State in fall ‘94 (when we had the best team in college but had to play a seriously bad Oregon team in the non-Coalition Rose Bowl) and summer ‘98, when the fans were as pumped as always. That and having grown up in Central PA, where Mike Mussina was a senior when I joined him in high school, and the Home of Little League is right across the river, I can tell you what true blue fans look like — and it ain’t like the population of Colorado. Although f-in’ awesome in every other way, from below Cherry Creek (southwest Denver) to Fort Collins—where most of the folks in the state live—the state of Colorado has maybe the most fickle fans in the country — which I say as a PhD in Journalism & Mass Comm from CU, in Class of ‘02 who beat Nebraska, 63-36, before downing Texas, to take the Big XII for the last time before going to the PAC. I easily got assigned-seat grad student tickets in the teen rows at the 30, all four years I was there—facing the Flatirons along the Rockies in the background, the best view in college football—not frantically returning my student invite to the PSU athletics office by the next day and praying I got a GA ticket in the End Zone, facing at nothing but field, from somewhere in the south End Zone.

Moving to Austin to be a professor at Texas, in fall of ‘02, as faculty, I had to buy a $70 “Longhorns All Sports Pass” (which thankfully included Women’s Volleyball tickets) just to be eligible to enter a lottery for meh football seats, 50-60 rows up on the southern 20, if I were lucky. It reminded me what it was like to be around real fans who knew the players’ names, regardless of the rankings, and CU had just won a title 12 years prior, while Texas hadn’t won since ‘67 — until Vince Young dove into the corner of the End Zone, holding the ball out, inside the pylons.

Whether it’s the amazing geography CU, in particular, or the area, in general—which gets 300 days of sunshine a year—CU and Denver fans only care when they think they have a shot at a championship — and because most have no idea what’s happening in sports, that “fandom” doesn’t come out, until a (semi-)finals series or a (conference) championship game. The Avs were a bit of an exception, having won the first year in CO, and again a few years later, getting into the Finals a few times around those titles, to boot. By 2010, though, that love was worn out.

It just seems to me that—knowing CU and knowing EA—it’s ALL about money, whether the team is that or EA can leverage the (deserved) hype to get some. There’s a reason Penn State is featured in the EA trailer for Sights and Sounds — and it ain’t the sights and sounds of losing to Ole Miss. Penn State has the biggest Alumni Association in the world, and its Denver chapter has a bar downtown, 1,572 miles away from Beaver Stadium.

Shedeur Sanders is the most exciting player in the NCAA, righ’now, and his coach dad brought college football its biggest year in the past twenty. So being on the cover, repping a 4-8 team, along with with a National Champion and a playoff team QB from the biggest football-lovin’ state in the union, EA is looking for a big payday, as always. No disrespect to my Buffs. I’m a dedicated fan of all the schools at which I was a student and/or worked, but I’m pulling for Colorado, this year, especially, ‘cause it’s their only shot at building a fandom, since my last two years of high school. Penn State and Texas, though, have roots running as deep as any ever in the sport. Pretty obvious, from the cover, the team Colorado nudged out for the NC, in ‘90, is the same team they nudged off the front of the box, in 25. Without something a bit more spectacular, I’m gonna be the only one around wearing Buffs gear, next year…