When players return to EA Sports College Football 25 this July, they’ll make a familiar choice when they first boot into the game: Pick your favorite school. From there, they’ll get a main screen customized to that college, with its colors, logos, and pictures of the team in action.
But there’s one tiny little feature that had me changing the favorite school setting repeatedly in my hands-on-time with College Football 25 at a preview event EA Sports hosted last week in Orlando. And that’s The Ticket.
In the lower right corner of the screen, amongst the other visual checks to the university’s football tradition, is a mock ticket stub mentioning the school’s home stadium. Look a little closer, and you’ll see this is a reference to its greatest, or at least its most memorable, game played there.
The tickets are the brainchild of producer Ben Haumiller, and I remember him talking about this with me almost two years ago. Ben was almost giddy, blue-skying some of the all-timers and no-brainers that these tickets would reference. (“I gave Miami a Wide Right,” Haumiller said, referencing one of two infamous games Florida State lost to the Hurricanes on a missed field goal.) However small it may seem, its another nod that, taken together, adds up to a huge affirmation of a player’s fandom, if not their own collegiate experience.
For N.C. State, where I graduated in 1995, Ben actually selected a game we both attended: a thundering 2012 upset of Florida State, where Ben graduated. We were at Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, N.C., where Ben was showing me how EA Sports collected crowd audio for the NCAA Football series it published at the time.
State beat the No. 3 Seminoles 17-16, coming back from a 16-0 halftime deficit to shut out FSU in the second half and mount another inexorable Wolfpack comeback. The upset win resulted in one exuberant State fan getting memed into the stratosphere:
The ticket Ben used for State’s home screen is that guy’s seat. It’s so perfect, it damn near brings tears to my eye.
Among the other big games I saw, California, of course, seemed to be the oldest — 1982’s “The Play” against rival Stanford. Ben gave his alma mater “The Choke at Doak,” That was the 1994 game, in the last year when it was possible to have a tie, when the No. 7 Seminoles behind Danny Kanell and Warrick Dunn, scored 28 points in the fourth quarter to claim a draw with their despised rivals, the No. 4 Florida Gators.
Much as Ben would prefer to give his team an outright victory, if there’s a “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” moment in major college football, this is it. “We know we’re going to hear in forums, ‘Hey, why didn’t you use this game, it’s a better one,’” Haumiller said. “And if so, we’ll look at it, and we can change it.”
I gave him one immediately. In the build I saw, Navy’s “ticket” was against rival Army, a game that has been played on a neutral field all but five times in 130 years. But in 1984, at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, a going-nowhere 3-5-1 Midshipmen crew stunned undefeated and No. 2 South Carolina 38-21, erasing the Gamecocks from the national championship picture with just one game left. The pall of that loss still hangs over Sakerlina’s frustrated football program to this day.
How were College Football 25’s ‘Ticket’ games determined?
Haumiller could only guess at the hours he put into researching this, but as a through-and-through college football fan, he considered it time well spent, personally. “For some of the teams, especially the ones newer to FBS [Football Bowl Subdivision, the top tier] it was a little tough,” Haumiller said. “So I would look for close scores in rivalry games and use those.”
Another limiting factor is it has to be a home win; shocking upsets recorded by Appalachian State in 2007 against Michigan, and Georgia Southern against Florida in 2013, both came on the road (making them even more shocking). And Boise State’s electrifying, kitchen-sink playbook victory over Oklahoma in 2007, which landed quarterback Jared Zabransky on the cover of NCAA Football 08, was a bowl game played in Arizona.
Still, when College Football 25 arrives July 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, take a few minutes to change your favorite team, and just look at some of the tickets that are presented on their main screens. It’s a worthwhile trip deep into the record book, whether or not you’re a fan of the team.
