You've actually hit the nail on the head right there. The facemasks, outlines of players, and goal posts, etc. in NCAA and Madden have quite a few jaggies- you probably just weren't seeing those fine details on your older TV with its lower-res raster.
As for what you bring up about anti-aliasing: pick your poison. Do you want to run heavy anti-aliasing to get rid of the jaggies, or do you like having the game at 60 FPS with quick controls and fluid animations? My guess is that you can't have both on current-gen hardware.