Relive and recreate the 2019 Cardinal football season while we prepare for 2020 with NCAA Football ‘14

So winter championships have been cancelled. Spring sports have followed that by cancelling their seasons as well. All thanks in part to the coronavirus outbreak that’s consumed the world.

We’re here, though, as sports journalists to keep the news coming whether it’s as a reprieve from the world’s news or whether it’s to report factual, actual newsworthy items from Stanford athletics. While the factual news is harder to find with thousands of people off the streets and no sports in session, we figured we’d take a look the next best thing that was on the horizon: the fall football season.

So how else do we discuss a season that’s months away from new games and practices as well as months far from its close? We relive and recreate our own storylines using EA Sports’ NCAA Football 14 and in doing so, will create a brand new offseason and fictional 2020 season to discuss that will ultimately tie into the real sports world.

Today we will kick off the 2019 NCAA football season in retrospect, allowing for different storylines to appear from our current reality, though we’ll start off at the very exact point that we did last year. Each team will begin at 0-0, each team will have the same chance to win their conference title and/or national title.

This idea, originally crafted over at Pacific Takes, will coincide with weekly, daily posts here on RoT. And so, with that in mind, here are the rules, as I laid them out on PT:

1. We’ll start off with updated rosters, up to the last week of the 2019 regular season.
— These rosters will have each player named, adjusted to height, weight, hometown (as best they can), class, etc. and will even adjust to players who sat out or earned a redshirt last year.
— These rosters have been adjusted to the year’s end statistics and level of play as judged by me and from my time from PFF, i.e. Joe Burrow is the only 99 overall quarterback, Penei Sewell is the pinnacle of offensive linemen, Ja’Marr Chase is ridiculously good, and so on, and so forth (if you have questions, or want to see more rosters, just DM me or comment below).

2. We’ll attempt to recreate schedules to as close as possible with the real 2019-20 schedules but will allow default non-conference matchups to take place as scheduling games in NCAA Football 14 is a nightmare.
— In some instances, it would be impossible to create a perfect schedule because we’re still playing with Idaho as one of the 130 FBS schools and as such, will have 12 mismatched games (at minimum).

3. We will be simulating non-conference games and non-Pac-12 games and allowing the results to speak for themselves while also documenting the week’s top players, best games, star moments, etc.

4. We will also be simulating recruiting for all but the Pac-12 as we’ll be attempting to recreate the recruiting classes that have signed on the dotted line for all Pac-12 schools in 2020.

5. The difficulty is set to All-American with some adjustments to the sliders to help make the game play a little bit more realistic (i.e. CPU interceptions lowered a bit so the MLB doesn’t make a random play on the ball 20+ yards downfield away from his coverage zone on a wide-open throw; can you tell that’s happened to me before?!). If you’re interested in these sliders, just ask to see them.

6. Expect to see full detailed game previews, game recaps, Heisman updates, Top 25 reactions, and just about every other weekly, daily piece from this season as you would during a regular season, in real life.

7. This is being played on a Playstation 3, on EA Sports’ NCAA Football 14 and if the popularity deems it appropriate, we will start an online dynasty with up to 11 other people, so get your copies of the game ready to go!

So join along as we relive and recreate the 2019 Cardinal football season during this sports hiatus. Also, be sure to check out Pacific Takes during this time as we’ll discuss all things Pac-12 in this recreation. In doing so, we’ll prepare for and discuss all things college football in 2020.

This will be just for fun, comments and the like are encouraged as we all cope with our new reality that virtual reality is the best way to watch sports this spring.