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You are looking live at the fourth annual EA Sports NCAA Football season simulation, a major offseason landmark and much-anticipated sign that the college football season is fast approaching.

It's also the perfect storm, one where our extreme "nerdom" for both video games and football collide in a bizarre pixelated vortex.

With the launch of NCAA Football 14 on Tuesday, July 9, comes an important exercise: Simulate the season ahead using the inimitable forecasting powers of a video game and document what college football’s ultimate predictor has to say.

Although our 2012 season simulation did not produce the most memorable results—let’s just forget about that BCS championship pick (Oklahoma 42, USC 28) and move on—the weekly simulations from the 2012 campaign produced a record of 51-22. The game indeed has powers, magical ones, and I am confident these powers will translate to the latest version.

As for the simulation, please take note that the PS3 was the game system used. This is typically one of the most frequent questions asked and appears to be strangely important to many of you. Xbox has been the featured platform in the past, but we’re riding the momentum gained on the system used a year ago.

The bar has been raised.

As for roster management, very few changes had to be made manually. The one important item of note comes out of South Bend at quarterback. Everett Golson’s 2013 departure from Notre Dame was the lone major alteration, and it has been accounted for in the game.

Spoiler alert: Let's just say it is a notable change.

As always, this exercise has not been doctored or altered whatsoever. I take my video game simulations quite seriously, thank you, and the results and records are exactly as they appeared on the game for this one and only simulation.

Here are the awards, records, bowls and, of course, the final BCS National Championship Game picks, according to NCAA 14.

Football is coming, friends.