Video games and the IU football fan.

This is the third and final post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2013. Before I say much, I have a confession:

I am completely out of the video game loop. I have never a hardcore gamer, but through my college and post-college years I certainly spent some time playing on a variety of platforms, including Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Playstation 1 and Playstation 2. My oldest child was born in May 2007, and I'm not sure that I have turned on my Playstation since then. Still, during the early and mid-2000s, video games were a fun diversion for me, and none as much as the prior versions of EA's college football games. Having come of age during the Atari2600 era, the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s were great, because they finally were a realization of what we always knew video games could become someday. Playing these games and seeing the "real" Memorial Stadium, authentic IU uniforms, rosters that coincided with real players (back then, getting the real names into the game involved shipping a memory card to an enterprising youth), and all that was great fun. And, of course, for those of us who are IU fans, playing the various incarnations of the EA games allowed us to "experience," if only for a few minutes, seeing IU in the Rose Bowl, in the BCA title game, as a perennial Big Ten power. Sure, there's no confusion about whether it's real or imagined, but considering the hopelessness that can be involved in being an IU football fan, I suppose the fantasy world can provide some hope for the real world. I mean, consider Northwestern's 1995 season: after 23 consecutive losing seasons, won the opener at Notre Dame, lost at home to Miami of Ohio, and then ran the table in the Big Ten. Sometimes a video game season becomes real, and let's hope it happens to the Hoosiers sometime.

This post was sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 13. Check out the video for the game below.

EA SPORTS NCAA Football 13 TV: "Son" (via EASPORTS)