I always loved the water graphics for Gamecube, especially Wave Race: Blue Storm (which I think I might have missed on here ... dammit, Wikipedia) and Sunshine. So shiny.
Well, you and everyone else looking at the sales figures. But on my playground there was a big war between Gamecube and Xbox and I was GCN all the way. But most everyone also had access to a PS2 ... yeah, little me was kind of insufferable.
Like I said, I'm not really aware of which year/versions of these games I played, since I never got them every year. Maybe my brother did, but I'm not going to say for sure, and there's nothing for me to really talk about, since I barely understood football at the time. Any features they added would have been lost on me.
The ONE thing in a football game I remember thinking was super cool was you could watch fans tear down the goalpost in an NCAA game. I rented it specifically to see that happen, only for EGM to run a correction saying that feature was only in their review copies. That got me pretty salty, honestly.