With the landmark NIL agreement finally giving college athletes the ability to legally profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness rights, the floodgates have opened to players earning money while playing collegiately. It’s also been key to bringing back EA Sports College Football, which became one of the best-selling games of 2024 in its comeback season. Now, other series are looking for ways to get a part of that pie, most notably with college basketball. We know that EA Sports is working on a new basketball game, but a recent rumor has given us a better look at what competitor 2K Sports has planned.
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Recently, the official NBA 2K account tweeted a teaser suggesting that the developers are working on a new college basketball game. Now, a new report from Sports Business Journal has more details about 2K’s plans. You’ll want to take all of this with a massive grain of salt until 2K announces something officially, but it’s promising news for college basketball fans.
Sports Business Journal claims that sources have revealed 2K Sports is planning on a standalone college basketball game. That’s important because some rumors were making the rounds that 2K wanted to create a DLC add-on to NBA 2K26 instead of building a completely new game. The report also says that “more than 100 men’s and women’s teams” will be included and receive “fair market value” as part of the NIL agreement.
What’s interesting about this is that the report specifically says the developer is currently targeting every Power 4 conference school. That means schools in the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and SEC will seemingly be included. That’s a solid selection of schools across men’s and women’s basketball, but it skips out on several powerhouse programs.
For example, if 2K sticks to the Power 4, it’ll miss out on schools like Memphis, Gonzaga, and Butler, to name just a few high-performing teams over the last few decades. It would also make the March Madness tournament (assuming it’s included) feel very different from real life. After all, is it really March Madness if there isn’t the chance for a Cinderella team like UMBC or Fairleigh Dickinson to go on a deep run?
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To be fair, it was always going to be difficult for EA Sports or 2K Sports to get every D1 team into a basketball game. There are only 134 FBS teams in football, but D1 basketball has 364 schools. That’s a huge increase in licensing fees, so it will never be easy to get everyone. Hopefully, both developers can figure out a deal that makes sense, bringing fans a true-to-life college basketball experience.
Again, all of this is simply a rumor for now. 2K Sports and EA Sports will hopefully reveal something about their ongoing efforts to ship a college basketball game relatively soon, but we wouldn’t expect to hear anything concrete this year. While we’d love to be proven wrong, it seems more likely that both publishers would save the announcement for the 2026 March Madness tournament, capturing fans at the peak of the sport’s hype.
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