The steady drip, drip, drip in the O’Bannon case continues apace. I don’t think this is something the NCAA wants to have the public hear as the class certification hearing approaches:
College sports video games were designed to replicate actual players without using their names, a former Electronic Arts Sports executive producer said in his deposition as part of the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit.
Jeremy Strauser, who worked at EA from 1995 until 2011, testified last December that computer-game avatars were linked to specific player identifying numbers and biographical information, such as team depth charts, was used to make the game realistic.
“We generally tried to make the players perform as their real life counterparts, short of their name and likeness,” Strauser testified.
They all knew what they were doing with these games. Either the NCAA can make itself look sillier by insisting otherwise, or it can start blaming EA for what happened. My money’s on both.
Get The Picture 
Wow, so you think that there are people out there that don’t believe that game tried to accurately replicate specific players abilities? Heck, all you had to do was go to a third party to download all the names for the game and poof!
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“An economic consultant for the companies previously concluded that less than 25 percent of NCAA football and men’s basketball players have corresponding avatars in EA games.”
Sounds like a small number, but that really means it’s just the starters, then. Not surprising they wouldn’t spend the time and money to do the same for the scrubs.
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“An economic consultant for the companies” is code for “take this report with a grain of salt”.
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In other words, the main players which most people would want to use if they played the game are the ones whose stats, numbers, etc. are being used by game companies and the NCAA to make moneyl, while the actual players get zip.
can anyone honestly claim to be surprised that they try to use everything but the player’s name and actual face to make the avatar perform the way his stats say he’d perform? can anyone who admits this claim to be surprised that just about anyone who plays the games knows WHO the avatar is supposed to be, and mostly the avatars are picked BECAUSE of who they are?
One of my cousins was a starter for an ACC hoops school a few years ago. His avatar in NCAA Whatever Year was his height, his weight, shot the same percentage, had his number. His name wasnt on the back of the jersey, but other than that the big difference was they changed his hair color. For all intents and purposes, it was a Game Machine Him, and clearly meant to be so.
Multilply that by however many years the games have existed, and however many players they have electronically cloned, and the inescapable conclusion is that sooner or later, the NCAA is going down like the Titanic. They appear to be trying to use the tactic of rich litigants with bad legal positions everywhere: fight a war of attrition and hope the other guy loses hope, runs out of cash, or finally settles for a pittance. Sometimes, that works, but it doesnt seem that this is one of those times.
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Reblogged this on 3rdand57 and commented:
Just more NCAA nonsense. More good stuff from GetThePicture blog. Hard not to lose hope.
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