Monday morning, the
EA SPORTS College Football 25 social media accounts shared that in just 12 days after offering them contracts, over 10,000 student-athletes had already opted in to appear in the game ahead of the reported April 30 deadline to decide.
To put this number into perspective, if EA offered 85 players (as rumored) on all 131 teams (
service academy players are not yet eligible to opt-in), then 11,135 contracts were offered in total. If 10,000 opted in, that would mean nearly 90% of players will be in the game as of today. Two other ways to put this number into scale: it would be the equivalent of all but 12 full teams being in the game or an average of just 8-9 holdouts per school with over eight weeks to go. Later in the day, VP of Global Marketing, Communications, and Partnerships for EA SPORTS
John Reseburg tweeted that more players "are joining every hour."
However, on Monday evening
Anwar Richardson of OrangeBloods.com tweeted that multiple people had told him that Texas QB Arch Manning would be opting out of appearing in the title in order to 'focus on playing football on the field.' Partaking in NIL deals has been very rare for the former highly coveted recruit. To date, his only accepted agreement has been with Panini America where proceeds from an event ($100,000) went to a Central Texas non-profit.
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