The Mids Get a Dose of Reality

Use of Navy Team Film Ensures Video-Game Authenticity

When Navy junior wide receiver Mario Washington gets his hands on NCAA Football 10, the latest edition of the popular EA Sports video game, he will immediately pull up the Midshipmen and see how accurately the game represents his team. For the most part, the game has been true to life in the past, Washington said, but he wishes its version of Navy's offense was a little faster, to make it more realistic.

The new edition of the game, which will be released tomorrow, should make Washington happy. One of the priorities for associate designers and playbook specialists Anthony White and Larry Richart was improving the game's representation of the flexbone formation, and they acquired a copy of a Navy game film -- the same film that is used by coaches to evaluate and scout -- to help them do that.

The NCAA Football series is known for its painstaking attention to detail; the rendering of Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium even includes the tent on the concourse where the pregame "Captain's BBQ" is held.

"We like to have everything be as authentic as possible," designer Ben Haumiller said. "We have our limitations -- we know we can't have actual [college] players -- but we like to get everything else we can for the teams to be as close as possible. We try to get uniforms as close as possible, and we update the stadiums. Playbooks are a big part of that, too."

Only a handful of division I-A teams rely heavily on the flexbone, but it is a formation that is unique to college football and helps differentiate the NCAA Football series from its popular sibling, Madden NFL, Richart said. Navy is probably the team most identified with the triple option; the Midshipmen's offense has led the nation in rushing in each of the past four years and helped lead Navy to six straight bowl games.

"You'd be surprised at how many people really wanted to have an accurate representation of the flexbone," White said. "Especially when [Coach] Paul Johnson left Navy to go to Georgia Tech. That's when it really started to become more of a mainstream thing, because now you got a big-time school doing it."

White and Richart are the only playbook designers out of the more than 70 people who worked on NCAA Football 10 at EA's Tiburon studio in Orlando, and both, not surprisingly, have football backgrounds. White, 35, played for and coached a semipro team shortly after getting out of the Air Force, and he has also coached youth teams. Richart, 33, was a walk-on quarterback at Florida and a member of its 1996 national championship team; his father, Phil, played at Louisville and coached at the high school and college level.

They record as many games as possible off of television -- and considering that college football is broadcast almost every day of the week during the fall, that's quite a few -- and then watch four or five of them a day, taking meticulous notes. They try to see every division I-A team at least twice. They are, by their own accounts, obsessive; a few years ago, White attended a game at nearby Central Florida and took notes while sitting in the stands, "even though my team was getting blasted," he said.

"It's no problem to be up at 2 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday, watching that Hawaii game out in Honolulu," White said. "You see something -- 'Wow, that was pretty cool' -- and you take notes."

Said Richart, "Our wives think we're nuts."

But those notes serve as the foundation for what White and Richart do. They look at formations, personnel, alignments, motion. They keep track of how often a particular formation is used, in order to determine which ones should be added to or deleted from a team's playbook.

"We pay attention to specific players, as far as how they carry out their particular assignments," White said. "For example, a quarterback: does he fake, then give? Or does he give, then fake? It's almost like how a real coach scouts his opponent. You're basically trying to get every one of their tendencies, and once you compile all that data, then you're able to go in and get with the engineers, the animators, the [motion-capture] talent."