Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2025

This is one of those games that you'll either absolutely love or hate. Luckily, they have a free 1 week demo of the game on their website to try it out. This is the perfect college basketball management/simulation game IMO. There are some QOL stuff that is missing, but they've added NIL this year and it actually has an impact. The transfer portal can actually give you quality players and be a source of recruiting with NIL, like it is in the real world. You'll be able to smaller conference All-Conference players hit the portal and know they're an impact player to recruit even if you haven't scouted them yet. NIL is still pretty basic and you cannot control exactly how much your collective offers a recruit, meaning your collective could end up offering their entire NIL fund to a single player when in reality you wanted to split it between two guys. I asked the dev during their launch live stream and he said they're looking to add in a way to tell your collective to spend a certain amount towards a player, instead of it being an all or nothing approach that could leave you out to dry for other recruits. It's easier as a bigger program because your NIL fund grows with the more success you have, to where eventually you'll have a couple million in funding and can afford to offer 3-4 top recruits each season scholarships with NIL. ----------------------------------------- This is a game you can sink hundreds, if not thousands of hours into. You can micromanage as much as you want and coach every single game, or you can let the computer automate practice, depth charts, and even in-game coaching and substitutions and play it as a true simulation where you just recruit and watch your team. The customization allows you to import the real life teams and coaches too. It's extremely easy and can found on their forums. -------------------- There's still some frustration with the game freezing during loading screens if you click too much, but the only actual game-side complaint I have is that they still haven't figured out a way to have low overall but high potential players not just auto-declare for the draft. It sucks recruiting a top 10 recruit and spending thousands of recruiting dollars and 1+ million in NIL just to find out he's a 2 star overall with 5 star potential and may see the court only in garbage time, only to then declare for the NBA.

Look I love the idea of the game and there is a lot of fun aspects with recruiting and such but in reality the sim engine is not good. I spent 8 seasons at a small school trying to create a realistic program build and regardless of the player level the outcome of the season is nearly identically year after year. My first few season I had average players ie 1 and 2 stars, and would finish with basically a .500 record. Now the following years I started to get better recruits consistently like 3,4, and even some 5 stars and would finish with basically the same record. At first I thought it was lack of understanding the offensive and defensive system we were playing but going into my final year I had a team of 4 and 5 star talent levels with understanding of the systems, good team and coach chem and the outcome was the exact same finishing 10-8 in conference playing teams that were clearly levels below. It just seems like regardless of the team level each game sim is a coin flip. I would literally beat the number 1 team in the country then lose to a half star team the very next game.

Could be good, but it feels like it was released without any bug testing

Excellent college basketball simulation! Going to play much more. Thanks to the dev(s) for creating this gem! :)

Fun, addicting college basketball sim comparable to the OOTP franchise. You can spend hours managing your team without it feeling dull or drawn out. Would recommend for sim sports fans.

THE best college basketball simulation game out there

A Fun low-end PC friendly game you can play on a crappy school laptop

Best college sports franchise on steam.

This game should have came with a disclaimer that if you move to many teams in conference realignment, it will not work. The majority of my 6.5 hours has been waiting for the game to generate schedules. Something the game can't do if you move teams. I should have seen it coming because you there's no option to remove team from a conference. You can only add and swap. It also doesn't let you set the number of independents you want. It hinders the creativity of those who want to try to have conferences with older realignments (for example, UCONN in the American). It sucks because my alma mater is in the game and I wanted to have fun with building them up. Because the one feature I wanted didn't work. I will likely stick to playing the 2023 edition of the game.

Been away from the game for a number of years, but am happy with this installment. Great depth, love the NIL addition, and no issues with bugs/gameplay.