I would like to carry the torch...

[ZekeRoberts]

...for a member who seems to have been banned... mostly because i am curious to see if anyone else has noticed the whole "race of the academic create-a-team" thing that was brought up in a thread that has now been closed...

i definitely don't want to be banned from this wonderful forum, so i am not here to accuse EA or anyone else of being racist, but i do feel that this is a topic that merits some calm and frank discussion...

i had a good friend who i turned on to NCAA football last year, especially the customizable features of creating teams and players, and of course the recruiting we all know and love. well, he created an academic team and, sho' 'nuff, they were all white. he became suspicious of the game to the point where he wanted to work on a dynasty project where one of us recruited only white players, and one of us recruited only black players, and then simulate seasons to see what sort of effect (if any) this would have on both our teams' academic prestige as well as any discipline problems...

now at this point let me say that i am an AP statistics teacher and i realize full well the lengths we would have to go to in order to prove any oversight (i will not say wrongdoing) on EA's part... HOWEVER, my colleague was certainly convinced to curiousity to say the least...

what i would like to know is if anyone else has had any experience, or is interested enough to create an academic team on this year's version and see what happens... i created one this evening, and here are my results

out of 58 players, i had 53 "Light" skin, 3 "Medium" skin, and 2 "Dark" skin, and my created school was in Florida, the default option (in Stats we may call this a lurking variable if we can identify a correlation between school type and skin color)

p.s. please don't close this thread, if people want to take a few minutes to respond i really think it would be interesting to look at trials from several people

p.p.s. if you are responding please be respectful and appropriate to keep the thread alive

[thmst30]

Please do not even try to start. There are WAY too many young kids on here that will ruin this thread quickly. Its a game, heck Mexicans can complain that there are few of them in the game, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Jamaicans, Australians, Middle Easterners, etc. They can all say its racist that they aren't even in the game. EA did not intentionally try to infer that African Americans are stupid. We all know they aren't so please drop it.

[rudyjuly2]

This is definately a sensitive issue but I also graduated with a math and stats degree so I'm curious about the numbers myself. However, before you go any further than this, I need to know about the breakdowns of rosters that are not academic. If you created a team in Florida that wasn't academic and had the same racial breakdown, there would be no claims of racism (just goofy programming imo).

Now, if a non academic program has 70% black players you would have a point in that EA could potentially be building in a racial bias. To defend EA though, maybe they are building Academic teams like this as built upon an Ivy league school system for those that want it. If they took racial percentages from those schools (I have no clue what they would be) and applied them within the game, I don't think its a big deal.

I think the original banned poster assumed that every person who disagreed was a closet racist was wrong. This discussion can be interesting and we don't have to stick our heads in the sand to have a non controversial discussion either.

[grismosw]

This is simple, do a little research in NCAA 2007 and you will see that for a created Academic team they just copy the roster of an Ivy League team. Yes, they are lazy but don't go calling anyone racist.

[rudyjuly2]

Quote: Originally Posted by grismosw

This is simple, do a little research in NCAA 2007 and you will see that for a created Academic team they just copy the roster of an Ivy League team. Yes, they are lazy but don't go calling anyone racist.

Good catch and I think this resolves this issue completely. Do I get credit for at least guessing it? This is simply a case of laziness and nothing to do with racism to me. This topic now holds no interest for me anymore.

[bgeno]

Wow... is that really true that they just copy a roster?

Explain this some more.

[stabmasterb]

ea is racist just look at madden. zero white tailbacks starters and zero white cornerback starters. this is an outrage.

[Keyser Soze]

LOL, I think it is so sad that people try to fish around and start up trouble on these boards. I also find it equally pathetic that people can't make comments about FACTS such as skin color on a team as long as it is fact. There is a huge difference between statistics (facts) and people opinions.

The schools that are MOST associated with high academic prestige in college football are the academies and Ivy league schools and there you will find a greater percentage of white players then at other division one school. This is fact, not opinion, and it has nothing to do with EA's doing. To my knowledge they do not have anything to do with the recruiting in real life football. It’s only when people take the next step and speculate why we have these statistics in real life that we enter choppy waters. Since this board is about video games and I think that EA simply applied present day statistics to their creation features, I don’t even see a torch that needs carrying.