Tuesday, July 11th was supposed to be one of the best days of the year. The EA Sports annual release date for the NCAA Football video game passed again without filling stores and households across the country. It’s now been 4 straight seasons without the game, and worse still, Denard Robinson remains the last athlete to grace the cover.

As a quick aside, if Manti Te’o doesn’t have the catfish stuff pop up in early 2013 would he have been the cover athlete for NCAA Football 2014? A Notre Dame player did make the final cut for the cover voting, one Mr. Tyler Eifert.

Anyway, at some point this game is coming back and on Wednesday the topic of NCAA Football returning popped up again in my article about making college football better. There’s nothing more popular in the sport than wanting this game to grace our presence again. With that in mind, I wanted to talk about changes to the game whenever the time comes that we get to play it again.

Full disclosure: I can only really go into detail about basic dynasty mode. The online features will likely be pretty cool compared to 2013 but that’s not my cup of tea. Likewise, gameplay and graphics are important but I don’t have a ton to add in those arenas. After a minimum of 5 years, and likely much longer, whenever the game comes back the gameplay and graphics are going to be incredibly improved anyway.

My inspiration for improvement will largely come from NBA 2K, and especially for the in-depth dynasty add-ons, that come from the likes of Football Manager, Out of the Park, and Franchise Hockey Manager.

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My first move is to create a hierarchy of employees. You’re the athletic director and you have to hire a head coach, assistant coaches, strength coaches, convince grad assistants (who you can groom to be future assistants) to work with you, and also put together a medical staff.

An in-depth financial system would be key to my new NCAA Football. This would go far behind having a budget to work with each season. For example, many games make it far too easy to amass a ridiculous amount of wealth (hello, FIFA!) after just a couple seasons. Therefore, I’d introduce a random code that effectively “steals” money from your pot. Maybe you finished your season with a profit of $45 million well too bad the university is taking $38 million for an academic pursuit. One off-season the school may take back 80%, another maybe only 7% you have to plan and adjust accordingly.

Stadium maintenance, stadium upgrades, facility upgrades and all the like will play an integral role in balancing a budget. I want to create a game that makes it really difficult to make money if you’re foolishly splashing money on as many upgrades as possible.

I also want to guard against creating a super program and that not having some financial repercussions for success. For example, the skills of assistant coaches (especially when simming) will have a huge effect on the development of players. When players win awards, head coach and position coaches earn bonuses. Inserting buyouts with contracts is another addition that could begin to eat up your football budget.

The same goes for recruiting where I’d spend a lot of planning to create coaches with diverse and wide-ranging skills at connecting with prospects. Even more, a realistic recruiting map with real-life high schools and the traditional hot-beds of talent. The further away a player is to you, the more it costs and adds strain to your budget. Did your school not take much of your money the previous off-season? You better take a chance on that recruit or two across the country!

A conundrum with recruiting is that it can take forever and can take up endless long hours in previous NCAA Football editions. I would keep things fairly limited to visits and try to make the system a little more random than in the past. I’d also set up an auto-recruiting feature based on a fixed budget for those who want to move quickly through seasons.

I’d enforce a 70-man traveling roster for road games and also create a youth or JV team within the program that is comprised of your redshirts (or anyone you designate, really) plus a continuing yearly auto-populated batch of walk-ons who could improve, turn into a gem, and eventually earn a scholarship. Don’t forget 85-scholarships is a must and has been missing from the game in the past!

More scheduling flexibility (to move around the dates of conference games especially) while creating AD-to-AD dialogue to sign future series. If you crush an opponent (or they suffer a bitter loss) that AD may not want to reschedule anything in the future. I’d also introduce buy games to further strain budgets, or increase budgets if you’re a smaller program.

God-like abilities to realign conferences was popular in past editions but I’d like things to be a little more realistic in this aspect. In the AD email inbox you could read stories about some teams looking to join a conference and some of the musical chairs that could happen–or even a team seeking independence and the shaking out of money that could result. Again, money would play a big part. Do you join a conference with the hope of making more money and will it work out in the end?

The historical data has to be deeper with season and career lists for numerous stats, team records, home/away splits, results against ranked teams, etc. I’d really make an effort to keep track of a wide ranging amount of stats.

Apparel companies probably would never agree to programs being able to switch their supplier in the game and if so the game should have an abundance of cleat options, in addition to a plethora of historical uniform choices and not just one or two options.

Bottom line, I’ve been dying for a game that has quality gameplay and graphics but incorporates the detail of really running a team the way many simulation games can do without even really playing games. That’s all I really want. What do you want to see from the next NCAA Football game?