The Next Great 'Owner Mode' Is Right in Front of Us

Maybe it’s constantly seeing Cody Campbell when watching college football, or the fact that college players getting paid is still fresh in my mind, but it seems fairly obvious to me that a management mode/owner mode in the next EA Sports College Football game just makes sense.

I’ve always said I don’t find “owner mode” in sports games particularly interesting, which makes my above statement nonsensical, but hear me out.

While I may I sound like a bit of a buzzkill saying I don’t like owner modes, especially because I also say superstar/career modes don’t do much for me either, there’s some big differences that make a college football version of the mode far more interesting to me.

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Being an owner is not particularly interesting in video game terms. There’s no real stakes when you’re an owner. You’re rich and own the team — those things are not going to change.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed owner mode in MVP Baseball 2005 because it was novel enough at the time trying to turn a profit while upgrading the stadium and doing concessions. However, it didn’t have staying power with me, and developers pretty clearly ran out of new ideas after a couple years.

Really, what I mostly enjoyed there were the stadium improvements and trying to retain my players, not really being the owner. The stadium status and player budgeting were the things that came closest to creating real stakes, and thus it’s probably why I cared about them.

In general, pro sports lack intrigue from an ownership level. From a video game standpoint, your only real jobs are making the right hires and deciding to pay someone or not. But you’re in charge of those decisions — you have ultimate decision-making power. You’re essentially playing on god mode, and that’s only fun in very specific sorts of video games.

This doesn’t mean owner modes can’t work or anything, but NBA 2K and Madden (among others) have all tried and kind of ultimately failed to make it the “best” way to play a franchise mode after the initial buzz of the mode being new wears off.

Now enter this dude who is always on my screen:

I don’t have anything meaningful to say about whether the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act needs to be amended or not (as always head to Matt Brown for stuff like that), but this Texas Tech booster and oil billionaire has had me thinking about all the choices you’re now making when being in charge of a college’s sports department — including having to take meetings with dudes like Campbell.

Whether you want to call it an Athletic Director mode (even though the AD is in charge of all sports not just football) or just a GM mode since it seems we’re handing that title out more these days, college football is home to all these new battles being waged that are shaping the future of college sports.

There are lots of people you need to keep happy, very real budget concerns, and very few “right” answers for how you proceed because there are so many unknowns. I don’t know about you all, but that sounds like a whole lot of STAKES, and stakes make for good video game modes.

College Football 27 GM Mode

Framing this as a GM mode is probably the best way to handle things because, again, an athletic director has more of a role than just football — and also has to worry far more about the faculty and dealing with thornier issues than sports games tend to want to handle to protect the brands of the licenses they’re using.

But at a base level, think of all the possibilities:

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