All this doesn't really affect me, because, as much as I would have loved to play a college football videogame, I was never able to; there were no PC versions, and, even if I had had a console, college sports games were not distributed in Europe and, up to the previous console generation, they were region locked as well.

So I was happy to hear that the NCAA had broken off ties with EA Sports, because I hate exclusivity agreements, and, the way things were going with EA, I would never get to play a CFB game. I'd be curious to see some other company have a try at making a college football game, just to see if they can do it better.

I guess a big part of the problem is that a game like this is not going to do well without licensed teams, so the big question going forward will be how the NCAA is going to handle licensing in the future.

continue the season with generic players.

Heck, with a little effort they could have just introduced a randomized element into the game and then done generic random ratings for each team so that they don't exactly match the current players but keep them within a range so that the teams more or less reflect the relative strengths from year to year.

Or you could have started with recruiting and fielded a fresh team that might not even reflect reality if you recruit well enough (or poorly).

but I think another road-block is lack of major conference trademarks. They could start-up with generic conferences but don't think it would sell.

The problem would be not having licensed teams. How many people would skip over a college football title where they couldn't play as their favourite team in a representation of their home stadium? This would be less of a problem on PC, since real team names, logos, uniforms, conferences and maybe even stadiums would be added back in by mods (especially if the game actively supported modding). On a console that would be a lot more difficult and you'd be stuck with generic teams.

On the other hand, I think, a lot less people would care about the players, because, if you play in dynasty mode, by the time you go through four or five seasons your team consists entirely of randomly generated players that you recruited over the years.

So, why the right version?