Let’s say you’ve had a falling out with your favorite college football team. Not to name names here, but hypothetically speaking, let’s just say your team, which in recent seasons had an incredible run near the top of its conference, spent the past year lingering in futility, with a faltering offense that barely managed to find first downs, much less the end zone. Your favorite team lost to its archrival in an embarrassing shutout and, in the offseason, fired its longtime coach in favor of an unproven and unpopular choice.

Clearly things aren’t going well for you and your team. But if you’re an Auburn Tigers fan–oops, we said we wouldn’t name names here–what do you do? Well, if you’re playing EA Sports’ upcoming NCAA Football 10, you just might consider replacing your favorite team with one of your own creation. An incredibly deep create-a-school feature makes its debut in EA’s upcoming college football game, and we got a chance to see it, and the rest of the game, for the first time at EA Sports’ recent New York City press event.

Technically, create-a-school isn’t new. The previous-generation versions of the NCAA Football series gave you the option to create schools from scratch, along with a limited number of options for school color and uniform style. With NCAA Football 10, create-a-school has been blown out; it’s so big, in fact, that the tools you use to create your school are completely separate from the game itself. Instead, the tools will be released as an application on the EA Sports World Web site. EA is aiming to release the application about a month prior to the game’s July release, which means you’ll get a head start on creating exactly the program you want and have it ready to go on day one.

As for the tool itself, it’s an easy-to-use Web application that takes you through the various steps of creating your school. You start with the basics–name, location, nickname, and so on–before moving on to the real meat of the tool, the graphics and uniform editor. Because this is a Web app, you can import any sort of graphic to serve as your team logo–or alternate logo, if you like–and the number of uniform options is much larger than in the old PS2/Xbox days. Handy tools such as a color matcher will let you identify and nail just the right color scheme for your team, and you’ll even be able to choose from any stadium in the game to serve as your home stadium. There’s no custom stadium creator, unfortunately, but you can choose from a handful of generic stadiums if you don’t want to use a well-known locale. In addition, you’ll be able to customize things like grass patterns and color (for that all-important Boise State look), as well as end zone appearance and on-field logo placement.

While the new create-a-school tool is great for people who want to create their own dream team, create actual FCS (Division II-A) programs that have heretofore been missing in the game, or re-create their high school or middle school programs, it seems like it’s going to be an equally functional tool for making sure your favorite team’s roster is fully up to date, or for accurately re-creating classic college teams (complete with their real lineups). The Web-based creation tool will let you create and rate every player on your team, and longtime NCAA fans know that typing in roster names with a mouse and keyboard is infinitely preferable to hunting and pecking with the in-game keyboard. Better yet, the ability to upload created schools as well as search through the thousands of user-created programs will mean that you’ll be able to explore and download from a huge variety of user-created schools.

Created schools will be available for play in both online and offline dynasties, as well as quick-play matches, but will not be available in Campus Legend mode or in online head-to-head matchups. This is because created schools become part of the online dynasty file that is shared between players in the dynasty; while in head-to-head matchups, sharing the data on both schools would result in a download too large to quickly get the game going.

The other new feature on display for NCAA 10 was the Season Showdown, an over-arching feature that looks to work off the rivalries that are already so prevalent in college football. Essentially, anything you do in NCAA 10 will earn you credits toward an overall score for your favorite team in NCAA 10. From playing games against the CPU, to taking on opponents online, or even playing Web games on the EA Sports World Web site, everything you do will contribute to your team’s overall score for that week. Essentially, even if your team is stinking it up on the field, with enough fan support, they might be winning games in Season Showdown.