Hasta La Creative!

If you’ve ever seen a movie about college, you know that the dean or president or whoever is always the villain, and if you can beat him at his own game, the day will be yours.

And so it is at Columbia College in Missouri, where the villain is the perfectly named President Dr. Dalrymple, and his game is Madden NFL 25.  

Dalrymple (who actually seems like a pretty fun guy and not much of a villain) has issued the video challenge below to students at his small private college, promising to buy one pupil’s textbooks for a year if he or she can win the school’s Madden Challenge on Oct. 17 and then defeat the president in a one-on-one showdown.

How big of a prize is on the line here? A recent survey of students found the average cost of books for an academic year was about $1,200. Of course, there’s no way to quantify the value of knowing the president had to cut a check for your books himself. (If he also had to carry your books to your classes for a week, turnout for the challenge would probably triple.)

The audio production on the “epic trash talk” video isn’t the best, but you have to give Dalrymple points for zingers like: “You can play as any team you’d like—the St. Louis Rams, the Dallas Cowboys, the Chicago Bears. You can even choose a professional team.”

Since students will be competing on last season’s copy of Madden (not the new Madden 2015), it’s doubtful this is a paid partnership with Electronic Arts. But we’ve put in a call to the college to find out and will update if we hear back.