NCAA Football 14 Cover Scandal Just Heating Up

You know the story...Michigan's Denard Robinson and Texas A&M's Ryan Swope were the final two contenders for the cover of NCAA Football 2014. EA Sports, in all their eternal wisdom, decided to put a poll on Facebook to decide the winner. Easy right? Well not really. After the voting period ended last night, controversy erupted.

We are aware of the voting irregularities around the NCAA Football 14 Cover Vote. We are in touch with the players and schools involved in the final round voting, and in the spirit of integrity and fair play, are in agreement that only votes from legitimate accounts will be counted in the cover vote.

Swope was able to close a gap of some 14,000 or so votes in just the final few days of voting. A little odd to say the least. 

Now of course, it's not that big of a deal. It's just a video game. But given the nature of the internet and people's reaction to such things, I couldn't help but agree with this take.

Still, it's amusing that it's come to this, because EA Sports totally left the door open by deciding to half-ass this contest with a murky voting standard that has, at various times, included Twitter hashtags and Facebook likes and polls and such, instead of creating a website and an application to tally votes there. Who really, honestly, cares if a bunch of Aggies created spam accounts or wrote bot programs to steal the election? Good for them! Honor their ingenuity and school spirit! For God's sake, this is a popularity contest in which ballot-stuffing—retweet this hashtag! Make us trend! Click like! Make my manager happy!—was encouraged from day one.

Agreed. EA should've just had one of their developers spit out a simple voting webpage in about an hour that could've alleviated all of this. You want #socialmedia to steer the boat? You get what you pay for.