From a Season-Ticket Drawing to InfoCision Stadium
Marty Whims, the Akron fan who served as his school's guest offensive play-caller for one possession in September, has been added to EA Sports' College Football 27, with the change arriving alongside the September 22 title update. Bleacher Report reported his inclusion in Dynasty mode.
The route to that was a promotion, not a recruiting chain. Akron announced the "Offensive Coordinator of the Game" concept on August 4, selecting a season-ticket holder through a random drawing to collaborate with head coach Fen Moorhead on scripting plays for the Zips' opening possession. Whims won, the university revealed him as the winner late in August, and the assignment came due in Week 2.
Who Whims Is Outside of Football
Whims is 46, an Akron native and a longtime football season-ticket holder. He graduated from Ellet High School in 1998 and from Akron in 2002, majoring in accounting, and is the chief financial officer of Stark Enterprises, a Cleveland-based real-estate company. He and his wife Dawn live in Cuyahoga Falls with three sons — Jacoby, 21, Zach, 18 and Ryan, 15 — all of whom planned to attend the home opener.
The week before the game he sat down with Moorhead in the coach's office on campus to build the script, and appeared on ESPN's College GameDay the morning of September 12. Describing the experience he called it "special," and said of his family's reaction: "They're pumped about it."
Four Plays, a Fumble and a 45-10 Win
The opening drive did not go the way a highlight wants. Robert Morris received the kickoff and went three-and-out, giving Akron the ball at its own 40 with 12:47 left in the first quarter. A 12-yard run by Jordan Gant produced a first down, a bubble screen gained two yards, and a run gained seven more before a false-start penalty on right guard Nate Hampton pushed the Zips back. On third-and-6, quarterback Cibastian Broughton completed a pass to Marcel Williams for seven yards, but Williams fumbled, and the possession Whims had scripted ended in a turnover.
Akron scored on its next drive — a 35-yard touchdown pass from Broughton to running back Sean Patrick capping a 10-play, 86-yard march — and went on to beat Robert Morris 45-10. Both teams entered at differing records, with Akron 1-1 and the Colonials 2-1, and the Zips finished the day with a win under a guest play-caller even if the scripted opening did not produce the intended result.
Why EA Adding Him Matters
The promotion was designed to sell tickets, and it worked in the narrow sense: a random drawing among season-ticket holders generated national coverage, a GameDay appearance and a story that outlived the game it came from. Akron was openly trying to boost attendance at home games, and a mid-major program with a real on-field product got a week of coverage it could not have bought.
EA's decision to put Whims in the game extends that. It is the second instance in three days of the September 22 update adding a human interest figure rather than a feature, alongside Deion Sanders's arrival as a playable coach. Read together, the two changes point at the same strategy: licensing names that carry an existing audience is cheaper than building one, and community-facing moments have become a reliable source of it.
What It Signals for Dynasty Saves
For Dynasty players the more useful takeaway is not the novelty but the pattern. Development decisions in Dynasty already turn on staff and program profile rather than raw recruiting alone, and an addition framed around a guest coach is a reminder that the mode's story texture is where EA has kept investing while its on-field bugs queue up. If you run a Group of Five rebuild, Akron's own profile is a decent template: a program that compensates for roster limitations with marketing and scheduling creativity.
Whims's scripted drive is also a fair object lesson in the part of coaching that a simulation can never fully model. A play script is an assumption about down and distance made before the defense votes. His first possession reached third down with the field position intact and lost the ball on the catch that moved it, which is the exact sequence that ends a game plan's relevance four plays in.
