July is the most anxious month for the independent roster editors devoted to Electronic Arts’ NCAA Football franchise. No matter what the game adds each year, promising an ever richer pageant of college football, it falls to these writers to add in the basic identities of the game’s performers, because NCAA amateurism rules forbid EA from including them. That leaves it to these roster editors and those they employ — some working on devkits in India — to hand-enter more than 8,000 players, across 120 teams. The task requires 20-hour workdays and contrivances to get advance copies of the game, all to complete a labour of love that only the most detail-oriented model railroader could ever hope to understand.