We Have Entered Peak Sports SZN - Operation Sports Newsletter

Coming off last week’s newsletter, I’m going to be honest and say I need a little breather. I loved putting together the recruiting guide for College Football 25 and the feedback has been really nice, but I also really wanted to make sure it was, ya know, good. And putting together about 6,000 words explaining everything EA doesn’t while trying not to get anything wrong means that the guide took a substantial amount of time to put together.

So, this week I’m going to ease up on the bloviating a pinch and direct you to some stuff going on with sports games right now and also point out some stuff in the community you may have missed. In other words, this first section will be shorter, but the other two sections will be beefier than usual.

Let’s get to it.

I’ve mentioned this newsletter before, but Opening Drive is a one-stop shop for humor and NFL news that hits your inbox every Monday morning. It’s breezy reading, and it obviously feels especially relevant this week with the Chiefs/Ravens kicking off the season last night.

As I was watching a ripper of an NFL game to kick off the year between the Ravens and Chiefs, it did hit me that there’s really no question this is the best time of year to be a sports fan and fan of sports video games. Assuming you don’t just like one or two sports, this is the time of year where you can get a little bit of everything.

• The college football season is truly underway now.

• The NFL season is here, and you probably had your fantasy drafts in the last week or two on top of that.

• NHL and NBA are both essentially around the corner and you can get plenty of early news about how teams are looking from beat reporters.

• Club soccer is now in full swing with the EPL and so forth back in action.

• We’re now in the thick of pennant races for MLB and those playoffs are just around the corner.

• The US Open for tennis is ongoing and we just had the PGA Tour Championship conclude last week.

• The only thing we’re really missing right now is some sort of draft as the MLB Draft is now behind us and obviously all the “big” sports are underway or about to start so all those drafts are months and months away.

Plus, it’s hard to argue there’s any better time for sports video games than right now. Sure, the games could all suck, but their release dates are grouped together at this point. College Football 25 is still fresh enough because it’s good enough to still be worth playing. Madden 25 is not as good but it’s still just Week 1 of the NFL season, so you’re going to be fired up to at least give it another shot or start a franchise you’ve been waiting on until the real football season begins.

NHL and EA FC are both out within the next month (FC 25 on September 20 and NHL 25 on October 4). NBA 2K25 is out RIGHT NOW as this is its launch week. There’s even a new version of Retro Bowl if you want some alternative football action that you can play right now on Apple Arcade.

Point being, if you can’t find a reason to be excited about either sports or sports video games at this very moment, you might need to take a break or find another hobby because this is about as good as it gets. For me, I’ll be watching a veritable potpourri of sports over the weekend, in between my sessions with Astro Bot.

All The News Ya Need

Speaking of some of those games, as I said, NBA 2K25 is out now. I have been playing it this week as I did get an advanced copy, but I’m not going to give too many impressions until next week’s newsletter. You can get plenty of impressions from the community, but I’m being somewhat cagey because I think 2K has the strongest version of a “honeymoon phase” of any sports game out there.

Sometimes the honeymoon rolls right into a wonderful marriage with the latest version of 2K, but other years you get back from that wonderful vacation and almost immediately think “oh crap, why did I think this was a good game a week ago?”

As of now, I still think it’s a good game on the court. The visuals got an upgrade. I’m excited about the PC version’s future. I really like what they did with some of the shooting settings because now you can still control your shooting but green releases aren’t automatic makes if you tweak the shooting settings a certain way. I think dribbling responsiveness has been improved in a noticeable fashion. On the negative side, off-ball screens remain way too potent, and for a game that revolutionized teams and players really being unique and true to the real-life versions of themselves, a lot of the AI teams feel a little same-y. It’s not that there aren’t tons of unique plays and signature animations, but the AI system just doesn’t quite seem to know how to bring it out.

It’s not dissimilar to one of my Madden complaints this year where I love all the playbook additions, but it kind of doesn’t matter if the AI teams aren’t actually going to use the whole playbook or teams aren’t going to feel unique or mimic their real-life counterparts.

I feel like I’ve already said too much and will regret it next week when my opinion is who knows where by that point, but I’ll tell you to at least poke around if you’ve been into NBA 2K in the past.

If you just want to play some FREE games this week, a couple different companies are giving out free play weekends. You can play Top Spin 2K25 for free on PlayStation and Xbox (presumably to tie into the US Open). It doesn’t get talked about a lot, but Top Spin 2K25 rules online. It’s not the deepest offline experience, but tennis games still hit the spot for me when they’re quality and have competitive online play, and I think Top Spin 2K25 reaches that bar.

Madden 25 also has a free play weekend in progress, and the Week 1 roster update is live. This is especially useful for those who either didn’t do the 10-hour trial or just have been on the fence. I still think the game is at least one more patch away from being potentially in a better spot gameplay-wise, but they did release a patch this week that included stuff like College Football 25’s Revamped Passing system. That system feels slightly out of place in Madden as I don’t think they originally planned for it, so Madden doesn’t quite feel like it has as many arcs to the ball as there is in CFB 25. Still, I think it will be a good addition in the long run.

We also have MLB The Show 24 for free via PlayStation Plus through the rest of this month. I have my beefs with The Show, but if you haven’t played it much in recent years, I still think you’ll be impressed by what’s here.

I mentioned Retro Bowl earlier, there is a fresh version out now on Apple Arcade. NFL Retro Bowl 25 has the real players and teams, and I’m obviously hopeful we get this version on other platforms at some point. If you’ve never played Retro Bowl, it has a throwback art style and has that same old-school feel on the sticks, and it’s one our favorite indie titles.

As for games on the horizon, EA FC 25 showcased its stadium upgrades this week, and NHL 25 showed off its gameplay improvements via a trailer and deep dive blog.

I wrote about NHL 25 last month after attending a virtual preview event, and my impressions remain mostly the same. If they do some quality stuff with the AI, it’s going to be a huge leap for the freshness of the series because everything from power plays to penalty kills to breakouts have been too familiar all around. Everything from players to teams to game style have all lacked individuality, and I think that’s a bummer because it’s still a fun pick-up-and-play game, but it needs more than that at this point. It needs to have multiple layers to it where it’s fun to pick up and play, but it also has to make serious fans take notice of actual hockey strategies working — or the top stars or teams playing more like themselves.

Community Shoutouts

If you liked my recruiting guide last week, I think the coolest recruiting-adjacent thing I saw this week was in the community. OS user moTIGS put together a breakdown of position changes and how they can lead to better results for some of your lower-tier players if you’re patient and a little lucky.

In essence, let’s say you change a WR to CB (this applies to the non-ATH recruits). He might go down 30-50 points and basically be unplayable that first year. But the game does seem to account for this major change, and you can see some big upgrades during the offseason(s). The upgrades can be so extreme that they maybe found their new “true” position. I don’t think this is a “bug” but more an unintended feature of sorts because I think what happens is the skill caps get re-evaluated when you make this major change. So I think part of what happens is if you get lucky with the skill cap re-evaluation, your potential for these players at new positions goes up even if the development trait obviously doesn’t change because you’ll have fewer skill caps.

It’s kind of like the “good” version of an actual bug where if you change a player’s position outside of the position change week (as in edit that player manually), then all the player’s badges/abilities get removed — even if you change them back to their original position. Anyway, that post is worth a read.

On the roster front for CFB 25, I’m slowly working my way through last week’s roster update and trying to update every single team to list out who’s still a fake player, who’s still missing (this is a rough estimate due to roster-size limitations in some instances), and also every player added in last week’s update.

If you’re a real sicko, OS user canes21 updated a dope tool that OS user Philospher0 posted last year for Madden that I did feature on the front page because it’s really friggin’ good playbook tool (and realistic if you want it to be). It’s now a Google Sheet with various built-in elements for College Football 25, but you can more or less build out your playcall sheet and also base it on “realistic” stuff like using the awareness rating to judge how much your QB should really get on his plate week to week. Basically, it’s a way to become more of a coach and add more layers to your playcalling within dynasty mode if you want to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole.

Lastly, I’ll give you a heads up that there’s lots of good stuff going on in the Custom Playbook thread for College Football 25. We’re always sharing ideas and ways to create certain sorts of playbooks, and it’s a good place to ask questions about a certain team’s style if you want to cultivate a playbook that matches up to that as much as possible.

If you’re looking for lots of built-in pre-play motion and read RPOs, I actually posted a playbook called MotionRPOHeavy under my PSN of ChucklesBiscotti. It’s not the most “realistic” playbook, and I didn’t weight the plays so you’d need to call them yourself rather than use Coach Suggestions, but it’s trying to somewhat mimic the “pro” style offense we’re seeing more at the college level without resorting to tons of wide formations that teams like Tennessee use with ruthless efficiency. I think it’s fun to use if you want to have optionality on most runs and passes, and it also has plenty of deep shots and play action to mix in once all those quick decisions start to wear down a defense.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase