March Madness Remains a Sore Spot for Sports Game Fans

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Stand up right now wherever you are if you remember when 2K brought college basketball back into our lives last month!

Sit down, you don’t remember that, liar.

We have an official OS Account that you all can sign-up for now. I implore all of you, whether you want to subscribe to a paid tier or not, to go that site and sign-up. Go there, click the “Sign In” button and then use either Discord or your OS name to log-in and connect everything together.

And speaking of which, please join the OS Discord.

No, really, it did happen! We got current college players in a basketball game in 2026. Where did we get these players? Well, it was in NBA 2K26 via MyTeam obviously.

…Oh, and there it is, I can see through the screen right now your enthusiasm just up and vanished like a fart in the wind.

I’m not anti-card collecting modes. I play them every year to varying degrees, but the idea that the first time we got real college basketball players back in any tangible way was via “Season 5 of MyTeam” was truly tone deaf on the part of 2K.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were on the precipice of what seemed like a real college basketball future with EA securing “exclusive” licensing and promising a game within a 3-year window. Then 2K responded and made a plea about exclusivity being unacceptable and EA dropped out — and 2K essentially ended up with that same exclusivity by default.

2K has promised a “college basketball experience” by 2027 that will have over 100 programs. An “experience” is not necessarily a standalone game. An “experience” may very well be just an extension of MyTeam with a March Madness-style bracket and some, but not all, college basketball programs.

Who wants that? We’ve seen with the WBC this year in The Show the limits of a tourney tied to a card-collecting mode. It’s still fun enough to see some new stadiums and the jerseys, but it’s not the real tournament, the real rosters, and you can only play it inside DD.

SDS has multiple licensing issues and a mountain of cash dished out by other companies that put some limits on their WBC dreams, and 2K will be forking out millions for licensing to make any college basketball “experience” a reality. However, the difference here is 2K is choosing to limit its scope out of the box, while SDS was somewhat forced to based on Konami and other factors a bit outside its control.

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I’ve made the case before that I somewhat understand the trepidation from 2K/Take-Two, a company that is clearly risk-averse now when it comes to sports games. College Hoops 2K was cancelled due to a lack of profits in their mind, not because of lawsuits. And college hoops as a genre ran its course and died out before lawsuits ended all college sports games for a decade.

But nostalgia is powerful, and the people are hungry for new licensed sports game experiences. EA’s college football game was always more successful than any college basketball game, but it still doesn’t change the fact that EA’s college game came back and became more successful than it ever was before.

It wasn’t the best college football game ever made, but it was the first in a really long time and that was the only boost it needed beyond fans noticing that EA was taking this rebirth seriously.

So as I sit here tonight watching 11 seeds cause chaos in everyone’s brackets, I wonder how seriously 2K is actually taking this whole college basketball video game “experience” thing.

Authenticity still matters, and that goes beyond licensing. People can sense when you’re serious about a game, and if 2K’s “experience” is MyTeam-first and only includes a tournament mode rather than a full-on Legacy mode, there’s nothing but failure that awaits it.

It’s also important to remember that CFB 25/26 did not succeed because of Ultimate Team. CFB is a hit because people are playing dynasty mode a lot — and bought it do that. In fact, its Ultimate Team is terrible, and EA doesn’t even run from that fact, which tells you what you need to know considering how much EA usually cares about that mode.

I’m sure they’d love to make more money than they do from Ultimate Team, but they’ve given the resources to dynasty mode, and even “regs” (aka, normal online H2H games) over Ultimate Team a lot of the time because that’s where the people are right now.

On some level, I wonder if those two modes are so much more popular than in any other EA game because a lot of the people who are playing CFB again are maybe the ones who stopped playing sports games in general when EA’s game died — at that point Ultimate Team did exist in the series but it wasn’t as much a focal point across the entire sports genre as it is now.

Ultimately, it’s the standard chicken or the egg argument there because are dynasty mode and the Road to the CFP popular and get resources from EA because they’re popular and played a lot or because EA clearly cares about them and puts effort into them? EA sometimes will point to metrics for why one mode gets more love than another during development, but certain modes have no chance of gaining traction if you don’t try to improve them and dissuade people from thinking they’re stinky afterthoughts.

But turning my attention back to 2K, it would be sending the college basketball “experience” to die if it doesn’t ship with a Legacy mode. 2K hasn’t forgotten how to make an interesting franchise mode, and delaying it beyond the first edition of the game to wait and see how the “first version” does would be idiotic.

2K hasn’t said everything they’re planning so I’m not going to go too hard on them beyond that, but I’m just putting it out there now that nostalgia only works if it actually taps into the nostalgia.

Does that mean the college basketball 2K “experience” needs a Selection Sunday show and all that right out of the box? I won’t make bullet item demands like that because re-creating the old game one-for-one isn’t a good idea either. That presentation piece was fun, but it was not a massive reason Legacy mode was a critical darling. It was more like the sprinkles on top of an already tasty dessert.

There’s not much more I need to say on this right now because we’re still at least a year away from 2K bringing something out, but March Madness is a glorious time of the year, and it would be amazing if there was another reason to enjoy it once again in the not-so-distant future.