Last week I wrote a long piece on what I consider to be the future of sports game career modes which, to me, are the most exciting thing happening in the genre. The story generated a lot of feedback, with tons of readers sharing what they'd like to see in the next crop of career modes in sports games. I thought I'd highlight some snippets of my favorite comments here to underline the importance of career modes to players (and sports game developers too):

rynedee starts us off strong with thoughts on career continuity and character records:

The one improvement that would vault [Road to the Show mode from Sony's MLB series] above everyone else is the ability to import a previous RttS character. A baseball season is at least twice as long as any other sport, thus restarting your character from the beginning every year is tedious at best. I'd like my 1B for the Cubs to be enshrined into Cooperstown but am not willing to spend three or four actual years playing 162 games for 15 seasons to do this. One more thing RttS needs is a reduction in loading times (it's frustrating to spend a minute or two to load a game, see that you are a pinch runner in the 9th with two outs and nowhere to go and spend the next minute or two reloading the menus).

This leads me to an improvement all career modes could make: the inclusion of records. Campus Legend and The Show do this to some extent but doesn't have the depth. I'd like to see school/franchise, conference and NCAA/league/association records, not just the overall record (eg 755) but the top 25 or 100. This ties in to having ownership of your character, only it's the historical aspect. I want to say that NFL2k5 did this really well.

EWSzuba reminds us that career modes have been done before and, in some cases, better:

Dynamix and Sierra made Front Page Sports (Baseball and Football) with career modes way before it became popular in today's renditions. I had a career league in FPS:Football that ran through 5 versions of the game and over 50 seasons with big name players being created solely on combining a (then) NFL player's first name with another player's last name. Later versions let you put in your own names. After that many seasons, you even had the listings for all-time records in every category.