On the day his love came back to him, Jalyn Armour-Davis counted down the seconds on his TV screen. The Ravens cornerback had already waited more than a decade, so on July 15, with just hours to go, he passed the time with a workout. When Armour-Davis returned, just five minutes remained on the countdown. One shower later, there it was, waiting for him.
On his PlayStation 5.
“Nobody text me for the rest of the day; nobody call me,” Armour-Davis remembered thinking. “Just leave me alone. I won’t be responding.”
EA Sports’ “College Football 25” was out. He had a lot of catching up to do. So did a lot of teammates. If the Ravens’ season opener against the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs next month is their most anticipated rematch in years, the long-awaited video game was the team’s most anticipated relaunch in some time.
Released on the eve of training camp last month in Owings Mills, “College Football 25” has emerged as both a centerpiece and conversation piece around the Ravens’ facility, with battles regularly waged on their locker room TV or in hotel rooms during moments of downtime.
“Everybody plays it,” inside linebacker Trenton Simpson said. “If we can get any off time, that’s all people want to do.”
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The game is one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters. EA Sports said it sold over 2 million copies of its premium edition, which offered access to Armour-Davis and others ahead of its wider release, and the market research firm Circana released data Wednesday showing that “College Football 25” was the year’s best-selling video game.
Around the NFL, though, its release was bittersweet. The game is the successor to “NCAA Football 14,” which was released in the summer of 2013 and then all but abandoned amid legal issues relating to name, image and likeness deals with players. Suddenly, rising stars who’d grown up playing the “NCAA Football” franchise couldn’t be sure they’d ever be in the game.
Ravens cornerback Arthur Maulet, a longtime fan, remembered getting Division I interest as a recruit and thinking he’d finally made it. “I finally get to be on the game!” he said, his voice cracking as he clapped. “I finally get to be on ‘NCAA’!”
Then, the summer before his first year at Copiah-Lincoln Community College, the NCAA announced it would not renew its licensing contract with EA Sports because of the ongoing legal dispute over NIL issues.
“I was really hurt, bro,” Maulet said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to actually be on the video game, and I could play with myself in college.’ I loved that, right? But then the guy comes out, talking about something, ‘Oh, yeah, well, you know, we should get paid for this.’ And we’re looking like, ‘Bro, we’re on the game! Be thankful!’”
“It wasn’t even a discussion of what anyone would be doing on the day that that game came out. We all know. We didn’t have to say anything.”
Ravens cornerback Jalyn Armour-Davis
Some Ravens had perfect timing. Before he signed with Baltimore as an undrafted rookie linebacker in 2014, Zach Orr was a standout linebacker at North Texas. His favorite video game franchise was “NCAA Football.” The game’s developers thought highly of him, too. “I was the highest-rated player at my school,” Orr, now the Ravens’ defensive coordinator, recalled with a smile. “So I let those guys know that.”
Other Ravens had to be more resourceful. One of rookie safety Sanoussi Kane’s childhood friends had an Xbox 360, and even after the “NCAA Football” series went on hiatus, they kept coming back to “NCAA Football 14.” The sport’s roster churn was no issue; they’d just download updated rosters from a third-party source, Kane said, and port them into the game. When Kane enrolled at Purdue, he could finally play as himself.
Still, the seventh-round pick couldn’t help but feel as if the game’s return had come a year too late. In February 2021, during Kane’s sophomore year, EA announced that the series would return. “I’m thinking, ‘They’re about to have the old rosters,’” Kane said. “I was like, ‘Aw, yeah, I’m playing as myself!’” But “College Football 25” wasn’t released until three-plus years later, after Kane’s last game with the Boilermakers. (Kane joked that he can still play with his brother, Moussa, a cornerback at Duke.)
Around college campuses, Ravens players said, the game has received near-universal acclaim. Armour-Davis didn’t need long to realize it was a phenomenon in NFL locker rooms, too. Ten days before the game first became available, quarterback Lamar Jackson had asked on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Who do I contact to get my NCAA 25 right now?” He quickly got a hookup. So did former Ravens inside linebacker Patrick Queen. Over the next two weeks, screenshots of the game started to flood players’ Instagram Stories.
“There’s people much older than me and much younger than me that were like, ‘We all know what time it was,’” Armour-Davis said. “It wasn’t even a discussion of what anyone would be doing on the day that that game came out. We all know. We didn’t have to say anything.”
Said Kane: “Whenever there’s a break, somebody’s going to be playing the game, without a doubt. There’s going to be somebody playing the game, so everybody’s been playing the game. It’s been fun. If somebody’s playing the game, you can all sit around and just watch the game.”
Simpson said that, for the first five or so days after he bought the game, “I was on it all day, just having fun.” Then his work life got in the way. Training camp was starting. Early in camp, he said he hadn’t played it since reporting to Owings Mills.
When Simpson picks the game back up again, he may need his own ramp-up period. In the NFL, schemes evolve quickly; in massively popular video games, strategies might evolve quicker. Armour-Davis joked early in camp that, while he wasn’t necessarily “boycotting” “College Football 25,” he wasn’t interested in getting back into online play.
“The homies that’s playing it more than me that’s not in camp, they got really good, and I’m tired of losing,” he said. “I’m in the middle of camp. I can’t even practice right now.”
The game’s allure has transcended even division rivalries. On Tuesday, the Steelers’ Queen told a reporter from Baltimore that, after repeated invitations from Kyle Hamilton, he’d finally agreed to play the Ravens’ All-Pro safety. Then Queen beat him.
“He was like, ‘You want a rematch?’” Queen said. “And I was like, ‘No.’ And that was it.”
Queen was already eyeing another Raven: Tight end Isaiah Likely, who’s flaunted his prowess on social media, might make for a good test. Told that Likely was about to fly out for Thursday’s joint practice against the Green Bay Packers, Queen sighed.
“Whenever y’all get back,” he said, “I’m going to need you to give him a message to come play me.”
Baltimore Banner reporter Giana Han contributed to this article.
