For as long as I can remember, NCAA Football has been the red-headed stepchild of the EA Sports empire of popular franchises. It has always sold and performed well once players got the controller in their hands, but there's always been a gap of sorts when it came to comparing NCAA to EA Sports' other mega-popular football franchise known as Madden. Well, wave goodbye to all that. EA Sports and the team at Tiburon in Orlando have gone to great lengths to separate the two products. NCAA Football 11 is the fruits of their labor.
The first and most immediately evident sign that you're playing a standalone football title is the new visual treatment that they've given NCAA 11. Overall, everything looks more realistic than it ever has before. The new lighting system brings great detail to the player models and their animations are more fluid and more realistic than I've seen prior. You'll notice cool details like player's faces grimacing as the opposing running back smokes by them for a quick score and the pain on a quarterback's face comes through in a big way once you see your first field-level replay of a sack.