Current Texas A&M Coach Mike Elko Had To Have A Team Meeting Over Players Playing Too Many Video Games
The upcoming release of "College Football 25" is sure to have a stranglehold on gamers who have waited more than a decade for the series to return. And that likely includes some of the student-athletes featured in the game. But Mike Elko knows what's coming — he's been through this before.
On Tuesday, Bryan-College Station Eagle reporter Travis Brown asked the Texas A&M head football coach if Aggies players seemed excited for the new video game. In response, Elko explained how he navigated the release of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" in October 2022, while he was the head coach at Duke.
"In full disclosure, because I've been a part of this before, you can't imagine how much the release of a hot new video game can impact your football team," Elko said. "I remember going all the way back to when the second ‘Call of Duty’ came out, and it got released in October in the middle of one of our football seasons.
"We literally were having meetings with our defense about why it was not good to stay up until 4 in the morning playing ‘Call of Duty.’ We had practice at 7 o'clock the next morning."
Mike Elko coached the Duke Blue Devils in 2022 and 2023.
(Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images)
The last release of EA Sports’ beloved series was in 2013. And it's (quite literally) a different ballgame now. "College Football 25" will be the first version of the game to be released in the NIL era.
Unable to use their actual names, past iterations featured loose representations of the athletes. But now, for the first time ever, the players can be compensated for their likeness in the game — if they opted in, that is.
So if Elko's players thought "Call of Duty" was cool — being an actual character in your own video game has to be WAY cooler. Maybe even cool enough to stay up all night when you have practice in the morning.
Might want to go ahead and schedule another one of those team meetings, Coach.