While I' m no sports fan I was wondering about EA' s new NFL exclusivity agreement.

Some say that this will completely kill off the competition and at first I almost thought along those lines but then it dawned on me that Sega can and SHOULD still release an ESPN Football 2K6 game. Of course the default game wouldn' t have any mention of the NFL, player names, Jersey numbers etc.

BUT that doesn' t stop the EDITED game from including them. ;) And I see nothing stopping them from including the city names - they just can' t include the team names and player likeness. Players can edit that stuff in themselves. That' s what made certain Japanese wrestling games so popular with some American wrestling fans. While the Japanese wrestling games didn' t include stars from American wrestling feds like WCW, WWE, and ECW, some of the characters looked close enough and had similar moves and all players had to do was tweak them a little more in the create-a-wrestler modes and voila!

Bottom line is that Sega' s known for their creativity so why not utilize that and include a very creative CREATE-A-PLAYER as well as a PLAYER EDIT feature that let' s players assign the appropriate names to the teams, jersey color, jersey numbers, etc. to the generic players? Make player editing a very painless process and keep the game at $19.99. They' ve already gained extra marketshare this year, why give up now? Release the game next year and see how things work out.

I was sitting in my boring English class last week when I came up with a pretty good idea...if Sega is ran by a smartass. Make a game where a bunch of teams from another league stole the team names, etc, etc. Then your team is from the old school and they proceed to win back all of their stuff they lost. I think that type of game would really piss EA off, and you could get some really good shots in at them if you wanted to. Of course it' ll probably happen the way you mentioned above though...I do not think this is the end of ESPN NFL titles.