As my NCAA Football 09 season begins, I wanted to establish a few control factors, for the sake of the readers who actually care about such things.  First, I am playing the game on default difficulty, with five minute quarters.  Although the game features "All Play" controls, I am trying to adjust to the advanced control scheme. Lastly, I won't be resetting or doing anything to prevent an unfortunate outcome. This is both a retrospective and an experiment. I'm just as curious as anyone to see if the motion controls can be appealing to someone who's had the standard gamepad controls burned into their brain for over a decade.

I am playing the first season of an NCAA Dynasty. As seasoned NCAA veterans know, a big part of the dynasty mode is recruiting; getting future college players to commit to play at your school next year. However as I am not planning on playing through more than one year, I don't plan on doing any of the recruiting. I'll let the computer recruit for me, and if I decide to keep playing, then I'll accept the results as-is.

As I begin the game, it's worth reflecting on what my team, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, were going through in 2008. Traditionally a powerhouse, the Cornhuskers (or Huskers for short) had just come off the worst season in modern history, finishing 5-7 in 2007 and allowing a dismal 38 points per game on defense. The Nebraska coach, Bill Callahan, was fired after the 2007 season, and a new coach, Bo Pelini, was hired to take over.  In reality, the 2008 squad did very well, finishing 9-4 and finishing first in their division.  Like Coach Pelini, I too am taking over a new, unfamiliar team in NCAA Football 09 for Wii: motion control.

Western Michigan at Nebraska should be a walk in the park. Most NCAA teams play 3 or 4 games outside their division to start their schedule, and usually most of those games are meant to be one-sided affairs.  In reality, Nebraska won 47-24 that day.  In my game, however, things didn't turn out quite so well.

Immediately, the motion controls proved incredibly difficult to adjust to. Western Michigan drove up and down the field on me with no resistance whatsoever, racking up a 21-0 lead before halftime.  A kick return brought the game up to 21-7 at the half, but that was a fluke more than anything else.  Western Michigan would score 17 unanswered points in the 3rd quarter to take a 38-7 lead.  No matter how I tried, I couldn't adjust on defense, whiffing on tackles and forgetting to use the sprint button.  Rushing on offense was hit and miss; as long as I had decent blocking, I could get a few yards, but learning to shake the Nunchuk to juke was very hard for me, so most of the time I dropped back and threw out of the shotgun.  After awhile, I began to find a rhythm, and before I knew it, I was hitting receiver after receiver.  One more lucky kick return later, and I was down 35-38 late in the fourth.  Unfortunately, a fumble on my last drive ended my chances, and Western Michigan pulled off the upset 38-35.  Looking at my stats, it's not hard to see where I went wrong: 14 for 25 passing with 3 touchdowns, but 4 interceptions.  My rushing game was abysmal, racking up 7 yards on 9 carries.  

Not a great start.  I have decided to lower the clock to 3 minute quarters, as 5 felt far too long.  Hopefully with my next game, I'll have gotten the controls down well enough to avoid a losing streak.  These are supposed to be the easy games, afterall.

After Week 1: Nebraska Cornhuskers (0-1)

After a less than stellar start, I regrouped against San Jose State, another cupcake game.  Unfortunately, things didn't go much better this time around.  San Jose State took the lead 7-0 early, and carried that lead into halftime.  Although I found the game coming a bit more naturally to me this time, that didn't stop my quarterback from throwing 3 interceptions in the second half, including 2 in the fourth quarter.

I took the lead over SJSU 14-7 late in the third, and held onto the lead until late into the fourth quarter. Unfortunately, two untimely turnovers gave my wily opponents 14 points in the final 30 seconds of the game leading to a 21-14 final score.  My friends, this is not going well.  This is what they call a "losing streak."  

I tried to let the in-game coach call more of the plays this time, so I could focus on getting the controls right. I realized that one reason I was having problems was because the sprint and dive buttons on defense were mapped to Z and C, meaning that my usual tactic of "run as fast as you can, and then hit as hard as you can" wasn't going to work. Instead, I kept my finger on the C button for dive, and swapped players until the CPU had one of my defenders close to the player with the ball.  That worked for awhile, but gave way in the fourth quarter.  

This is not looking good.  My chances at winning the Big XII this year are really going downhill fast.

After Week 2: Nebraska Cornhuskers (0-2)