EA’s College Football Future Takes Another Hit As SEC, Big Ten, Pac-12 Pull Out

When the NCAA announced it would no longer allow its logo and name to be used by EA Sports, it wasn’t the end of the company’s plans for college football video games. But now that three of the most prominent college sports conferences are following suit, the future for the popular “NCAA Football” franchise just got that much murkier.

ESPN.com reported today that the Southeastern Conference, Big Ten and Pac-12 have all decided not to renew their licenses with EA, meaning the company would have to go without their names and logos in future games. It’s a big hit to the realism of a series that has prided itself on increasingly accurate presentation with each successive release, and while it still probably won’t kill off college football games, it does raise another legitimate question to their viability.

As stated in the ESPN article, the Collegiate Licensing Company represents most major football schools (with notable exceptions like USC, Ohio State and Oregon), so colleges from the three conferences could still appear in future games. They’d just be waging their virtual gridiron battles in placeholder leagues, and any game without the powerhouse  SEC in it would be strange indeed.

With the specter of the Ed O’Bannon suit still looming and the recent controversy over Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel and his autograph signing activities, it’s something of a perfect storm of circumstances that is making every organization involved with college football reconsider how it handles its involvement with the money-making aspect of the sport. It remains to be seen if some of the other power conferences or even one of the non-CLC schools will decide to bow out of their EA Sports deals as well, but it’s already clear that each new defection makes it that much more likely that “NCAA Football 14” will truly be the last game of its kind.