NCAA was a trailblazer in the field of presentation, with a feature called "homefield advantage" building the atmosphere in the stadium and a pre-game show up in the booth that built the hype as the players ran onto the field in front of thousands of crazy fans.
Those were the days, for recent versions of both
Madden and NCAA have been sadly lacking in this particular area.
So why has next-gen STILL not found a way to replicate these features and take them beyond what we enjoyed on the PS2 and original Xbox.
The ESPN license should make it easy to have a pre-game and post-game show in NCAA 09. Access to the on-air personalities, Herbstreit and Corso, is available given that both visit EA a handful of times to record commentary every year. Surely it's a no-brainer to have a College Gameday type of show previewing each week of the season and a post-game show wrapping up either your own game or to deliver highlights from around the league each week.
This is even more obivous with
Madden, because EA has not only access to the ESPN network but also this "special relationship" with the NFL opening doors to the NFL Network on-air broadcasters. A variety of ESPN and NFL Network personalities have been used in recent versions of
Madden in different ways so again, it seems obvious that if EA is serious about presentation that these elements are essential. Think of a television broadcast that doesn't include some kind of half-time and post-game analysis ? I can't think of one...
