New college football video game doesn't actually have any college football teams

OK, so let's start with the good news: After a five year absence, the college football video game is officially returning to modern consoles thanks to Gridiron Champions. The bad news? It doesn't feature any actual college football teams. Half a decade later, the issue that eventually sunk EA's beloved NCAA Football franchise—that the names and likenesses of players cannot be used because neither the NCAA nor game developers are allowed to compensate them for said names and likenesses—has yet to be resolved. The NCAA is still terrible and college athletes are still unpaid, so Gridiron Champions has been forced to come up with a, umm, creative solution: 126 completely fictional, completely customizable teams, such as...

Still skeptical about the raw entertainment value of sifting through hours of recruiting menus to find just the right John Doe for your Mississippi A&M Raptors? Well, here's what IMackulate Vision Gaming has to say about their flagship project:

The first edition of Gridiron Champions may not be an “NCAA Licensed” college football video game but it will be a college football video game nonetheless. The game will feature 126+ generic colleges & universities...the community will be able to completely customize their user experience. This customization includes: uniforms, stadiums, players, rosters, conferences, etc. We have a extremely detailed plan of how to make the first edition of Gridiron Champions as true to the college experience that you witness on Saturday within the constraints our generic model. With that in mind, the goal has always been and always will be to produce a fully licensed product BUT there is a PROCESS at play.

So there you have it. The end goal is to work out NCAA licensing and revive the college football video game once and for all, but we will have to wait until 2020—when Gridiron Champions hits XBOX One, PS4, and Steam—to see if that happens.