Video games can be a lot like riding a bike: once you learn, it never goes away. A popular streamer found that out the hard way earlier this week.
Kentucky head football coach Will Stein beat Bordeaux, who has nearly 600,000 subscribers on YouTube, in a friendly game of College Football 27. UK was kind enough to post some of the reactions from that battle, where Stein and Bordeaux had the entire team watching them duel it out on the sticks.
The two only played a half of the EA-produced game, which was released in early July, but Stein still came out on top. Hearing the head coach cheer on his running back, CJ Baxter, and safety, Ty Bryant, in video game form is incredibly good content. We need the full video ASAP.
It was all in good fun (Bordeaux is a Kentucky fan, after all), but the competitive juices couldn’t help but flow from Stein’s veins. He was getting amped after big plays. Just imagine what he’ll look like seeing the real thing at Kroger Field this fall.
“No, I do not play it regularly,” Stein said with a laugh when asked on Saturday about facing Bordeaux. “I grew up playing that game, you know? But no, I’m not an avid video gamer. But I still got it, you know what I’m saying? I still got it — and Bordeaux got it.
“We played a half. I got lucky. He might have been taking it easy on me, but we had fun.”
The College Football series has been around since the 1990s, back when it was just known as NCAA Football. I played this game plenty as a kid growing up in the 2000s. I’d spend hours upon hours recruiting, developing, and building dynastic teams during the summers while off from school. It sounds like the 36-year-old Stein did the same thing, too. The franchise took a decade-long hiatus beginning in 2014, but returned in 2024 to much fanfare.
It’s probably been a dozen years since Stein fired up a system and sat down to play some College Football, but that experience as a youngster stayed with him against Bordeaux.