It may be a slow news week for video games, but Kotaku is putting out some fantastic feature stories. The latest is “Once a Labor of Love, Sales of Football Rosters Now Inflame Passions.”

Here’s the deal: EA puts out a series of games called “NCAA Football.” But where an NFL game would have a full roster for all the players, NCAA rules keep any player names or likenesses from being used. That means that everyone in the game is named “HB #15″ or something.

However, the games let you edit the names. But there’s hundreds of teams to edit. That would take forever.

So there’s fan-made sites out there with full rosters where you can download a file with the full roster and plug it right into the game. But one of them is buying out the others… and it’s charging money for the rosters.

One can’t help but think that if someone is making money off the athletes’ names and likenesses, it should be the athletes’ themselves, not a guy on the Internet or television networks. At a certain point, doesn’t amateur status become a charade?

In any case, if you’ve got one of the NCAA games, maybe you should give one of the remaining free sites a look.

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