NCAA Football 14: Denard Robinson, Ryan Swope Finalists to Appear on Cover
By Josh Hill
The search to find the next cover athlete for NCAA Football is down to two finalists. Fan voting has determined that Michigan and Texas A&M were the two most popular schools in the country last year (Alabama fans have an issue with that) and thusly two athletes have been chosen to represent their schools in the final stage of voting.
For Michigan, quarterback Denard Robinson will appear on the cover of NCAA Football 14 if he tallies enough votes, but it’s the choice for Texas A&M that has people scratching their heads.
The popular choice would have been for Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel to represent his school, but because he can’t be chosen as a cover athlete, speedy wide out Ryan Swope was chosen as the schools representative. Between Robinson and Swope, the folks at EA couldn’t have set this up to be more of an underwhelming vote than it currently is.
Currently, Robinson leads Swope in voting, but to be fair the polls opened on Facebook a little over an hour before this posting. One reason Robinson is going to get more votes is due to the fact that the national media spent way more time talking about Robinson than they did about Swope, and that’s not saying much because Robinson wasn’t talked about a lot outside of the first week of the season.
Swope made his name at A&M as a valuable target for Johnny Manziel and he’s continuing to make a name for himself at the NFL Combine thanks to his speed. Less than 2,000 votes separate the two and while it’s not an accurate representation of the powers within the NCAA, to be fair Eddie Lacy was in the final four and Crimson Tide fans failed to vote him into the final round.
To date, Michigan has had two cover athletes on NCAA Football games with Desmond Howard appearing on the 2006 version of the game and Charles Woodson appearing on the 1999 version of the game. Unless you count the nameless, faceless body trying to tackle Ricky Williams on the cover of NCAA 2000, Texas A&M has never had an athlete appear on the cover of NCAA Football in the entire history of the video game franchise.