NCAA Football 14 Cover Vote Moves to Second Round
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EA Sports has announced the 32 schools that are moving on in the competition to have their representative on the cover of NCAA Football 14. The group is unchanged from when the update was released last week with the exception of USC somehow bumping out Army despite getting virtually no support in either of the polls they were involved in.
1- Notre Dame
2- Stanford
3- Oregon
4- LSU
5- Texas A&M
6- Ohio State
7- Nebraska
8- Michigan
9- Kansas State
10- Penn State
11- West Virginia
12- Florida State
13- Clemson
14- Florida
15- Kentucky
16- Wisconsin
17- Alabama
18- TCU
19- Miami
20- Georgia
21- Utah
22- Oklahoma
23- Tennessee
24- Arkansas
25- Missouri
26- Oregon State
27- Georgia Tech
28- Iowa
29- Texas
30- Navy
31- USC
32- BYU
The handling of this cover vote has been a complete mess from the start. The initial announcement from EA laid out how to support the schools and that it would go beyond just the main poll on Facebook by counting in likes, comments, shares, tweets, Instagram photos, and Youtube videos. That was confusing enough considering it would be practically impossible to effectively track all those things or for anyone to have faith in their methodology. Apparently in mid-stream the company changed course and made it all about secondary FB polls and didn’t make this clear until the initiative was three weeks deep. Even the end date for the round, which was stated to be 12/31, was arbitrarily extended a week.
At least now EA is making it clear how the voting will be conducted by clearly stating it will be FB polls alone allowing fans the ability to show their support in this manner. It’s unlikely any of the schools slighted in the process of the first round would have pulled out the win at the end anyway so hopefully things are conducted more appropriately going forward. They have also revealed that it will be a cover athlete that comes from the winner and not just a school-centric cover. Once the field is narrowed to eight programs potential cover athletes will be announced. The round of 32, which will lead to the top 16 moving on, opens tomorrow and runs through January 15.