Yesterday, my annual celebration of college football was renewed. You might be wondering why this would happen in the middle of July. Well, Tuesday marked the release of another brilliant edition of the NCAA Football 2006 video game, available for PS2 and XBox.

New to this year’s version is “Chase for the Heisman.” In this mode, you can slap your name (or the comical name of your choice) on a high school player, choose the position he would play and run a series of drills to establish his skill level. Based on the results of the drills, you will be recruited by a handful of schools. Score two touchdowns on 10 attempts at running back, get recruited by Utah State, Baylor and Kent State. Intercept nine passes on 10 attempts at cornerback, and you will find yourself being wooed by the likes of USC, Miami and Texas. Of course, if the player chooses not to sign with one of the schools offering a scholarship, he can always walk on to the team of his choice.

From there, the player is taken to his “dorm room” where you can accumulate trophies, awards, fan mail and study the playbook in the hopes of building “Heisman Hype.” This new mode is a nice sojourn from the labor intensive “Dynasty” mode of years past (which remains intact for hard core players like myself).

The commentary remains top rate, easily outshining the game’s older brother, the John Madden NFL series. Brad Nessler, Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit provide their typical lively, if somewhat repetitive, banter.

The biggest cause for excitement for fans of the series is this season, Electronic Arts has fixed the most glaring problem from last season’s game. In NCAA ’05, in an attempt to toughen up the defense, the game tended to have massive gang tackling issues, which made running the ball almost impossible, and eliminated the big-play potential that makes the NCAA game so exciting.

Also new to this edition is impact players, who will get “in the zone” and gain skills to make big plays in key moments.

As is my annual standard, upon starting up the game I immediately began the labor intensive process of naming all the players on my team, as well as highly rated blue chip players from across the nation. NCAA rules prohibit EA Sports from using real player names, but all players have been thoroughly scouted and have realistic abilities and size models. For example, QB number 7 for Iowa State is a sophomore with all kinds of scrambling ability. Gee, who could that be?

Alas, tragedy has already befallen my Cyclones. After a rousing 84-10 thrashing of Illinois State, I played host to the No. 3 ranked Iowa Hawkeyes, in front of a full house at Jack Trice Stadium. I felt good about my chances of an upset — as much as I feel good about a Cyclone upset this fall — until I found my cornerbacks woefully overmatched by Iowa’s pass heavy offense. Drew Tate and Ed Hinkel were consistently “in the zone” and my defense was shredded for copious amounts of yardage throughout the game. Relying heavily on a ball control attack with Bret Meyer, Stevie Hicks and the occasional pass to big-play wide receiver Todd Blythe, I was able to stake a healthy lead heading into the fourth quarter. Sadly, Iowa’s intense defense and big money passing attack were too much, and I lost 31-29 on a last-second touchdown pass. Let’s hope this was not a sign of things to come.

Grade: 9.5 out of 10