Im having a heck of a time getting things properly setup to play ESPN 2K5 against any of my friends on XBox live.

Can someone describe the proper way to setup up a private game? I can always extend an invitation, but once my friend accepts it, he gets stuck at the "pick a team" screen and I get stuck on the "friend" page.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Try turning your xbox off and doing the same thing again (both of you). Could be a router issue...

I had a similar problem the first time I tried. Spent about a half hour trying to get it to work. A restart and it worked like you'd expect. Crazy bug.

Or he could be like me when I first got it, and not know how to do it right. You send the invite, you friend accepts it. Then you have to hit B to go BACK one screen, to the list of people online. Then you hit X to jump down to the list of people who accepted your challenge, then hit A to accept his challenge.

Maybe it says somewhere how to do this, but I was in the dark until someone finally explained it to me.

No, it's pretty weird. You would think that if someone challenges you, at that moment you could press A or something to accept.

You figure either one of the instruction manuals(paper book or in game) would have details about online play. How could they have barely mentioned online play in the instructions?

You can download an expanded manual from espnvideogames.com. It's a 60 page PDF file but it looks like it only has 1 page dedicated to online play.

Is that the same thing as the instruction manual that you can look at on the actual game disc? Besides, any time I go to espnvideogames.com all I get on screen is a bunch of garbage that I can't read. Guess they need to fix their website too.