There are a lot of issues plaguing college football, and the consequences are felt in the locker rooms around the country.
NIL? You betcha.
Transfer portal? Certainly.
Social media? Perhaps
But the biggest culprit of locker room dissension isn’t what you might think, according to an FBS head coach.
Southern Miss’ Charles Huff, who spent the past four seasons as the head coach of the Marshall Thundering Herd, opened up at the American Football Coaches Association in Charlotte. And in doing so, he revealed to fellow coaches that the biggest problem inside the confines of his locker room in Huntington, West Virginia, was actually a video game.
The long-awaited release of the first college football video game in a decade, College Football 25, led to players agreeing to be included in the game for a lump sum of $600. The game went on to become the best-selling sports video game ever.
But the root of the dissension had little to do with money. It had everything to do with the game’s ratings.
Huff, according to Brandon Marcello of CBS and 247Sports, saw his players complain about their ratings. Some even came to his office, not to talk shop or how they could get better, but to air their grievances with the arbitrary ratings that EA Sports placed on them.
Coach Charles Huff tells coaches at AFCA the biggest issue he ran into last season in the locker room wasn’t NIL or social media. No, it was players complaining about their ratings on College Football 25. Some even came to his office to complain about their “low” rating.
— Brandon Marcello (@bmarcello) January 13, 2025
It’s a fair concern, considering that Group of Five schools like Marshall aren’t exactly the cream of the crop within the game. Often, if you’re looking to rebuild a program in ‘Dynasty’ mode, you’re looking at schools like Marshall or Temple or even Sam Houston State and turning them into college football royalty.
That might be fun for you, me and Scott Van Pelt, but the players don’t care about that — they care about their ratings. And if New York Jets owner Woody Johnson is reportedly nixing trades due to Madden ratings, it’s not that far-fetched to see a draft pick being nixed because of a College Football 25 rating.
So, for those who think NIL deals will be the end of locker room harmony as we know it, it just might be a video game rating that changes the game.
