Bowl Bound College Football

I have had this game for several years, and have spent countless hours on it. This is a text based sports sim, and the best one out there on college football. Basically you run a D1 football program. You are in charge of recruiting, the budget, hiring and firing coordinators and you can call plays during the games if you would like to. The game even gives you some latitude on scheduling and player training. If you are looking for an arcade game this is not for you, but if you like deep text based sports sim, this would be a good one for you to check out.

If you are missing the dynasty aspects of the NCAA series, this is the game for you. While it currently still harbors some techinical problems, it is still a solid game.
Pros
+ In depth stats
+ Ability to structure custom playbook
+ Original BCS NC, 4 team, or 16 team playoff options
+ Academic suspensions
+ Shifting conferences
+ Setting of depth chart and CPU in-game strategy
Negatives
- Basic coaching options
- Occasional game crashes
- Over-simplfied recruiting
The game can be as simple or in depth as you want. You can play an entire season in 20 minutes or several hours. The recruiting is good overall, however it feels a little bland at many times. But offseason activities are far better than any college dynasty game I have seen before. If you enjoyed OOTPB or Football Manager, this will feel a little more shallow as it isn't at that level yet. But it is a solid addition to manager sims and is worth playing if you are a college football fan

When playing through the franchise modes of a modern sport game like NBA 2K or, to a lesser extent, Madden, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when the only place you could find the multi-season GM-like experience of these titles was the world of text simulations. The trade-off with these text sims was that they there were usually a one-man operation, with 99% of the time and effort spent trying to replicate accurate stats and finances of the sports they were simulating, and the remaining 1% spent quickly hobbling together a GUI to present all the information.
Bowl Bound College Football was one of the first among the new breed of text sims. By moving away from the ‘one-man operation’ model to employ others specialising in areas such as 2D graphics and UIs, BBCF attempted to merge the strengths of text sims – the multi-season experience, and statistical accuracy – with a GUI that also didn’t look like an excel spreadsheet. It succeeded. Despite the fact that the game has been out for some time now, the UI is still clean and modern looking, and little touches like player portraits for the generated players was years ahead of the 3D-based sporting titles. Even the BBCF simulation screen foreshadows the type of display we expect to see today in ‘quicksim’ screens in these 3D titles.
Graphics aside though, BBCF alse does the kind a great job simulating the kind o fcollege football experience – recruiting, strategy, statistical accuracy – that you expect from any text sim worth its salt. In any sports game, be it text sim or graphical, my favourite aspect is rebuilding a team into a winner, and the college world of sports is perfect for this given the continual overhaul needed to replace graduated players. Even after all these years – ignore my Steam stats, I’ve had this title on my PC for close to a decade - I fire it up from time-to-time and embark on yet another career.
With no other college football game around or even on the horizon, BBCF is a fine option to satisfy your college football hunger. Hopefully one day we see the long-rumoured Pro football version released!

I bought this game with doubts, because I was looking for a deep and modern american football sim especially for college. Unfortunately there are no real alternatives and most of the stuff is text based.
Finally I gave it a shot and I am enjoying it.
If you are looking for a college based american football managing game, and your imagination is big enough to see your players on the field, then I can recommend it to you.
If you are looking for 3D, or even a basic 2D simulation of your plays, then you won't be happy with it.
+ Playcalling - The rage is real
+ Playerdevelopement and recruiting
+ Real schoolnames/conferences/bowl-names as a mod available
+ New 4 team playoff mode available
+ Active online leagues
- No fullscreen mode
- No week to week practicing / Gamepreperations
- Rankings are a bit weird. Got a 0-3 team in the top 25 polls.

I've owned this game since 2005 and can't even begin to imagine how many years I've pumped into this game. To those of you giving negative reviews about "any game being released in 2015 should have full window support," please keep in mind this game is actually a decade old, but recently released on Steam. I wish I had the "manual" that comes along with the game now. It really acts more like a cheat sheet and something that will help everyone with the learning curve of the game. I highly recommend this game to anyone who is into text games. Unfortunately for us, the football text market is rather thin, but BBCF will give you many many hours of enjoyment.
Yes, there are some bugs which pop up from time to time requiring a shut down and reboot of the computer. However, they are nowhere near what they used to be. Key hint here is to make sure to have at least two different saves going for your world so that if one gets corrupted, you have the back up. All you do is in game options add a 1 to the save file and keep flipping back and forth. Its not a perfect solution, but with the amount of fun this game provides me, I'll deal with the smaller text/windows and crashes every once in awhile. They aren't anywhere near gamebreaking.
I hope you take the plunge and give this game a shot! You won't regret it!

I bought this game couple of years ago, and spent hours and hours with it. I saw it on sale a week ago, and it was a must buy. We, as GDS fans, must support the guys!
BBCF is a text based sports simulation game about College Football, and its the very best out there. Of cours, there are no license for the teams, but you can edit them or you can download mods. You can chose all Division 1 football programs, take charge of recruiting, call plays during a game, hire & fire staff members, budget of the program and scheduling. If your best Quarterback is bad at school, you can give him a few extra lessons to be good off and on the turf. If you like text sims like OOTP, TEW, WMMA you will like BBCF, too.

Glad to see this game be added to the Steam library, this is a game I have played for a few years and always enjoys the challenge and accuracy of the game. Great to see it updated to the current conference alignment and the option to have a playoff also. Worth taking a look at if you are a football fan, take over you favorite college program with tons of options so you can be as involved as you want.