Back in the 2000s, Merrimack College was a small, private school in the Augustinian tradition, with an athletic program that was mostly in Division II. Outside of hockey, the one sport the school was known for outside of its New England bubble, there wasn’t a Division I presence. In 2019, however, Merrimack, like more and more schools are doing in this era, transitioned to Division I in all sports. It’s still a small, private school in the Augustinian tradition, but in this case “small” means “nearly 6,000 total students” instead of 2,000 or so of 20 years ago. It’s becoming less of a commuter school and now tries to attract student-athletes from afar.
Merrimack has had athletic success since its transition. Men’s hockey just won Hockey East for the first time since joining in 1989, putting it in the national tournament. The men’s basketball team won its previous conference, the NEC, in 2023, but wasn’t yet eligible for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament—March Madness—due to the rules surrounding transitioning divisions. It made it to the MAAC conference tournament game in 2026, but lost to the school that fell to No. 1-seed Duke in The Big Dance as a 16-seed. The women’s basketball team has to contend with Fairfield in the MAAC—for context, the Stags were at one point ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 poll this season, despite being in a mid-major conference—so had to settle for a semifinals loss against them in the conference tournament.
Why the preamble? Because Merrimack is exactly the reason people love to play college sports video games. If you went to Merrimack, you’re probably from Massachusetts. And if you grew up in Massachusetts, you’re almost definitely aware of UConn women’s basketball, even if you don’t root for them. UConn has now won a record 12 NCAA championships, and is currently going for its 13th; we know what it looks like when UConn is champion. Nobody knows what it looks like when Merrimack is the national champ, though, and frankly that might never happen. And because there is no college basketball video game in the present, Merrimack fans can’t even fake it for fun.
When EA Sports College Football 25 came out in 2024, ending a similar college football drought, social media lit up with this very thing. No one playing the game seemed to have forgotten the point of it: taking control of a hapless program like UMass and turning it into a powerhouse in dynasty mode, making the moves that reality otherwise would never allow for. Hey, just because Indiana won a national championship doesn’t mean we need to believe literally anything can happen in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
College Basketball games became a normal part of the video game ecosystem during the 16-bit era, with both the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis featuring entries. Nintendo itself even published NCAA Basketball, developed by Sculptured Software, on the SNES in 1992. EA created Coach K College Basketball in 1995 using their NBA Live engine, which would transition into the NCAA March Madness/NCAA Basketball series. Sony’s 989 Sports briefly made PlayStation-exclusive games with NCAA Final Four, while 2K’s ESPN College Hoops transitioned into College Hoops 2K during the ’00s. These eventually all died out, just like EA’s college football series.
Unlike with college football, college basketball didn’t vanish primarily because of increased licensing costs, but a lack of sales. Matt Brown, founder and primary contributor to Extra Points, is in the business of college sports business, and broke the story of EA Sports College Football 25 development—he has also been at the forefront of the college basketball revival. As Brown tells The A.V. Club, “The college basketball games were discontinued before the college football games, not because of player likeness lawsuits, but because they weren’t selling. College basketball is far more of a niche product in the US than college football. 2K is working to create a new college basketball product, but with the market far less certain than with college football, major developers are moving with caution.”
As Brown reported in 2025, both EA and 2K submitted proposals for the revival of a college basketball video game following the success of EA Sports College Football 25, and the rights to licensing for it, with the College Licensing Company (CLC) preferring EA’s much larger proposal that would include every Division I basketball program—men’s and women’s—out of the gate, as well as likenesses for as many as 8,700 players—they just needed to opt-in and earn Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) cash for doing so. 2K, unsatisfied with this, reached out to some schools independently from their proposal, making EA’s dream of a unified game an impossibility thanks to the licensing issues that move created.
So, now we wait for 2K to produce…something. All we know for sure is that it won’t approach the scope of EA’s proposal. As Brown tells it, “[2K] didn’t commit to the full D-I slate in their proposal to CLC, and they haven’t committed to the full D-I slate in the press releases, and they haven’t committed to the full D-I slate in my conversations with their licensing team.” In 2K’s proposal from 2025, it suggested 130 teams max within five years of its first standalone game, which will release at a time still TBD—possibly within the next couple of years. College basketball isn’t college football, though, nor is it neatly split into subdivisions: 130 teams is a fraction of the whole, as there are 365 men’s programs and 363 women’s. UMass might very well be in whatever 2K comes out with at some point; Merrimack, maybe not.
So, here we are in 2026, with the Final Four approaching and no college basketball game on the market—just some college basketball DLC for NBA 2K26, a black hole of commodity fetishism where a video game should be. Thanks to 2K circumventing the CLC’s proposal, it might take the better part of a decade—if ever—for us to get the full slate of Division I college basketball at our fingertips, to be able to play as those teams that might never otherwise sniff a national championship in the real world. That’s depressing, but it fits with the state of basketball video games in 2026, at least. Merrimack’s dreams of a national championship remain as elusive in the video game world as they do the real one.
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