NBA 2K17’s all-time college rosters and why you probably don’t want to buy

2K Sports released the rosters with all-time greats from the 10 licensed universities in NBA 2K17 over the weekend. For $15 as a bundle, which is nearly 1/3 of the price buying the game through Amazon or Best Buy with their membership programs or a quarter of the full price, expectations would naturally be pretty high for what the downloadable content provides. Unfortunately it’s something that even big fans of these programs are likely to find inadequate.

Full rosters of the 10 colleges can be found on Sporting News. Besides the absence of some notable names there are teams that have only 10 players on the roster and not every position is even filled. More blatant is how the majority of the legends have been copied over from the classic teams. The majority are not newly created young college-aged versions of the players. Just one example is Allen Iverson who sports cornrows!

Despite all that if there were a purpose to these teams the flaws could probably be overlooked. Sadly there is none. The teams can only be used in Play Now games. Want to take them into MyLeague like any of the classic teams? Sorry it’s not possible. They can’t be used online and there’s no team editing or player exporting possible. The teams also played with NBA rules even when matched up against each other and the college crowds aren’t present.

There would of course be excitement about anything college video game related, given that there haven’t been any for years now and there’s no return for them in sight just yet. Bringing some universities into story mode in 2K16 and 2K17 was a brilliant move and as predicted last year just a first step – charging for additional college-related content would be completely fair as there’s no reasonable expectation for any of that to be in an NBA game. However just throwing uniforms on already created players and giving you nothing to do with the teams but exhibition games hardly justifies the steep cost being charged here.