What more should people expect from them? "
EA Sports is a division of
Electronic Arts that develops and publishes
sports video games."
They aren't serious sports enthusiasts. They're tech nerds who spend their days developing computer games.
This is not how this works at all.
The teams that develop these video games understand the CFB game very well, and have to translate the "known quantities", which our team is lacking on both sides of the ball, in to statistical models. If they did not do an effective job, enthusiasts who play the game would abandon it quickly. Updates enable the creative teams to reflect the season's performances.
EA's football games are very popular because they are fun. With practice, anyone can take a #50 ranked team to the National Championship after playing a couple of seasons in the game. If you play a lot, a season takes about 14-15 hours of time on the controller. I played these games in my 20s and the EA NCAA Football games always had excellent gameplay . One of the big draws was the crowd chants and fight songs. If you play the game correctly, your opponent will be extremely tired of hearing Rocky Top over the deafening/shaky crowd noise at Neyland.
OVR is mostly based on the skills scores of returning producers from the year before. Our big deficit is we are not returning many proven offensive weapons.
VOLS fans are high on Sampson, but he has yet to prove he can carry the load.
When Bru went down last season, which WR stepped up?
I totally agree our offense is underranked, but who cares. Unproven QB, RBs, and WRs, and reloaded OLine means we'll have to earn respect the hard way. I figure we should be in the Top15 in OVR, but whatever, really, but not in proven assets yet.
Neyland and the Big Orange have not been examples of consistently elite CFB for almost 20 years. No one automatically puts us in the elite bracket like they did with the mid-2000s Fulmer teams that were given the benefit of the doubt every preseason.
On defense, we have no idea what our secondary will look like. And if our players step up and perform at Charlotte and Norman, the game updates will give our team's players stats and abilities that reflect their performance, for good or ill.