While playing on the road, in any mode, quarterbacks can be flustered, lose confidence, and begin to make worse and worse choices during plays. When a quarterback starts to lose confidence, normally from throwing an interception, the play indicator line that normally appears under them will start to become unclear making the play harder. The shaky nerves can continue on until the QB has no idea what play is in motion and the receivers all have question marks instead of buttons indicators. This can be avoided by taking a quiz, after an interception is thrown, of what play the other team used. A correct answer has the QB shake off the bad play and regain confidence. The disadvantage of this is that most of the plays thrown up during the quiz are almost identical, thus making it painful to keep the quarterback under control after a series of bad plays.

NCAA does a good job of making each stadium feel unique as well, the one exception is the single high school field (which strangely looks exactly like the field at the high school I went to) that is used for all high school games besides the finals. Each stadium has its own characteristics that make them feel unique, along with interesting factoids on the load screen pertaining to each place and their team. The Play Now mode even has a choice of modifying the weather to any possible, or using the real conditions currently at that field.

None of the depth means that NCAA is without its problems, though. Random graphical errors are constantly present, the commentators sound like they couldn’t care less about what is going on as well as having nothing interesting to say, and the crowd has too few animations or unique fans in it. Half of the Achievements in the game can be gotten by using the fast forward option, Super Sim, through an entire game, making them feel worthless. None of this ever really seems to effect the core mechanics of the game, but it is a wonder, when the play is so refined, why most of the extra material in the game feels so unpolished.

NCAA ’09 manages to pull together a game that may possibly rival the upcoming Madden. With solid game play, an interesting, although strangely lacking, Campus Legend mode, and the addition of Online Dynasty, the game is a wise buy for any fan of football games. Although the absence of any form of a useful tutorial and only one new player-friendly mode means that this year probably isn’t going to be the one to win any new converts into the ways of college football.