News came out of EA Sports’ NCAA Football 14 twitter account earlier today that voting irregularities a.k.a. cheating has taken place in the cover vote between Texas A&M’s Ryan Swope and Michigan’s Denard Robinson. Apparently some fans have taken the vote so seriously that they created thousands of fake FaceBook profiles to cast extra votes.
Apparently the event that trigger the investigation took place yesterday when Denard Robinson was leading by almost 7,000 votes. Within a matter of hours, that lead had been wiped out and Ryan Swope had taken over. An investigation into the matter by EA Sports apparently uncovered the fake profiles.
This certainly could have been avoided had EA Sports decided to use a different platform to host the voting. It is notoriously easy to manipulate FaceBook’s polling feature.
There is still no word on how exactly the fake voting impacted the standing or whether it was just on the Texas A&M’s side. Voting closes tomorrow and we’d expect to get an answer by then.
Who did you vote for? Let us know in the comments section.
Whoever wrote this is a moron. There was a post on a UM alumni page TWO WEEKS ago detailing how to create fake “cause” profiles for voting. This method was copied by Aggie fans and posted to TexAgs.com just a few days ago. If anything, Denard has WAY more fake votes than Swope does at this point.
Thanks for your comment Ben. The article clearly states that there very well could have been cheating on both sides. There is no good way of knowing who received more fakes votes until EA Sports comes out and tells us.
I voted for Denard Robinson. I think he was the more exciting college player.
Man this is just crazy. Who cares enough about a video game cover to sit around making thousands of fake profiles?
What does it matter? The game developers should just pick an athlete & go with it.
I mean seriously, are you guys going to tkae the cover into the toilet with you & polish the knob. Uh, I mean, the door knob, the knob for the door.
I mean serioulsy, who cares if your boyfriend is on the cover, or not?
This is exactly my point of view. You could literally put anyone on that cover and I’ll buy it as long as it is a halfway decent game.
I guess the only exception being if you put a USC Trojan on there, I would boycott as a matter or principle.
It seems like this obsession with cover votes is no more than a marketing ploy, but it seems to be incredibly effective.