Quote Originally Posted by morsdraconis View Post
Exactly. It was random for random's sake and not because it has to be random.

No one is going to get a kid to come to their school without doing background checks that should, at the very least, hint at the possibility of the kid being a moron and doing something stupid with his life once he's free in the wild of college athletics.


If they were going to do it right, it would have to be a combination of several things to make it worth having:

1. Having enough things that the kids could get in trouble for doing without it always being stupid repetitive stuff
2. Having a hidden (very important) "rating" that determines the likelihood, how often, and the severity of their stupidity (aka the player screwing up)
3. There being a "background check" system implemented in recruiting - basically just another option to do with your time spent for the week on the recruiting (something like a background check requiring a certain amount of recruiting time for the week and would be accessible through the same menu in recruiting that you would go to to choose what topics to talk about during their visit for that week) - the background check would show information based on the amount of time you spent on it (allowing you to use just 10 minutes to get a very general feeling to spending a full 60 minutes on it and getting a thorough breakdown (but still not giving you the true "rating" for their "discipline" stat) - also, there would need to be the possibility of not getting all the facts on a situation or getting the wrong story completely if you don't spend the full 60 minutes (a percentage chance always being there, but it only being 5-10% at 60 minutes and increasing by quite a bit as you spend less time during the "background check").
4. Schools not going after the "troubled" recruits
5. All of this tying into school prestige, sanctions on the school (which would absolutely need to be implemented correctly to truly have the possibility of death penalties or another USC situation), and a coaching carousel (along with stats for coaches like College Hoops 2k5) and coaches and schools with high prestige having an affect on the athlete's likelihood of them causing trouble (along with having more athletes that are likely to not cause trouble setting good standards for the bad seeds and decreasing that likelihood that much more) (along with the fact that if you have more bad athletes, then the likelihood of them causing trouble would increase because of the bad standards being put forth by so many of the athletes at the program)

All of that, and discipline would be a very much welcomed addition to the NCAA series once again, in my opinion.
I was never a fan of this feature and hope that it doesn't return. However, if it does I hope that the system is revised to reflect some of your ideas. I'm skeptical that discipline will return because I don't think the NCAA would allow it. Off the field behavior has been a black-eye for the NCAA and I can't see them being happy about EA wanting to "feature" that aspect of collegiate athletics.