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On the Existence of a Madden Curse
10/09/06
by Clay

Shaun Alexander became the latest player to fall victim to the so-called Madden Curse a week ago. After playing seven seasons without missing a game, Alexander was injured last week against the New York Giants only a few months after he posed for the cover of Electronic Arts' Madden NFL 07 video game. Alexander joined Michael Vick, Donovan McNabb, Marshall Faulk and Daunte Culpepper as players who have followed up cover photographs on the most popular sports video game on earth with a prolonged stretch on the injury report that same season.

Other cover stars in Madden have suffered tremendous dropoffs in production (Dorsey Levens), made inexplicable career decisions (Barry Sanders retiring) and continued to do ridiculous dances that resemble Elaine from Seinfeld (Ray Lewis). All of these coincidences have conspired to create the sports jinx dubbed "the Madden Curse."

For the second time, Shaw's first-round draft pick ruins his fantasy season. What are you smiling about, Shaun?

In comparison, the Madden Curse would appear to make the Hope Diamond curse downright palatable. Millionaire athletes who have reached the apex of their sport are cursed as soon as they appear on the box of a video game. Rarely in American history has there been a more horrifying and unfortunate turn of events than millionaire athletes going from being pictured on a video game box to becoming millionaire athletes not capable of playing football. It almost makes me want to cry.

These curse stories, of course, ignore the fact that any player with a multimillion-dollar contract who gets injured just has more time to devote to his harem of groupies. This notwithstanding, however, we here at Deadly Hippos decided to continue our pursuit of the most legitimate and earth-shattering news in sports and unpack the mystery of the Madden Curse.

First and foremost, the person most frequently appearing on the cover of the Madden football game is John Madden himself. That's because before Madden 2000, all of the Madden covers featured the former coach and MNF host. And nothing bad has happened to Madden at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Before the video game, Madden was not a verb in the modern lexicon. If it wasn't for the video game, most people in their 20s and under would know Madden, if at all, for his insistent turducken references and occasionally drawing irregular circles on the teleprompter.

As is, Madden is an absolute icon with near universal name recognition. So the first distinction that has to be drawn is between players and others who appear on the cover of the game. If you or I were pictured, we'd be fine. Granted, no one would buy the game, but we wouldn't have anything to fear.

Second, Electronic Arts, the company that makes Madden, is also not cursed. So companies are not involved, either. EA has seen its stock price soar since the first Madden game debuted on game consoles in 1990. Since then, EA has sold more than 51 million copies of the game. If every Madden player had simply mortgaged their parents' home and bought EA stock in 1989, we could probably all own NFL franchises by now instead of just managing them on PlayStation or the Xbox.

To its credit, the EA Sports staff (perhaps terrified at the prospect of NFL players turning down cover status until Madden NFL 09 features Tony Romo) has mobilized and is eager to point out that both Eddie George and Ray Lewis had successful seasons after appearing as cover men. In fact, after his appearance on the cover of Madden 2001, George rushed for 1,509 yards and scored 16 touchdowns.

Some have argued that George was cursed because his Titans lost at home to the Baltimore Ravens after George bobbled a late pass that was returned for a touchdown by Ray Lewis. This is absurd. George is an exception to the curse. Rather than try to draw George into the curse morass, the better tack is to offer hypotheses as to why the curse did not apply. I'll offer two:

• George played every game his entire NFL career with heads of garlic wrapped around his neck.
• George is a vampire. (Note: these hypotheses need not necessarily be consistent.)

But to their discredit, the geniuses at EA Sports didn't point out the clearest reason the Madden Curse doesn't actually exist. Namely, that somebody would have had to curse the video game. Think about this: All sports curses require someone who applies the curse and could get vengeance by its resulting success. Who is allied against a sports video game?

Hmm... who could be behind such a thing...

The Chicago Cubs have the Curse of the Billy Goat, the Boston Red Sox used to have the Curse of the Bambino. Each of those was leveled or caused by an actual individual. Otherwise you just have a plain old jinx ("bad luck"), which is much less interesting. Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen anyone with a large witches' pot on the EA doorstep tossing in an eye of newt along with a clump of grass from Lambeau Field and maybe the 'X' button from a PlayStation controller to eternally doom anyone with the gall to appear on the cover of Madden.

Until a legitimate cursing occurs, what we're dealing with is a jinx. So we here at DH decided to come up with a list of seven groups/people we think would do the best job making the Madden Curse a reality:

1. Mothers: There is an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), so there could very easily be Mothers Opposing Madden (MOM). After all, if there is one thing that unites mothers everywhere, it's that they think their children play too many video games.

2. American soccer fans: Judging from the reaction my World Cup columns got, the people who hate football the most are those who like soccer over football. These people would do anything to ruin the sport -- including cursing its best players.

3. Borat: Let's be honest, wouldn't this be the perfect skit for Sacha Baron Cohen? Especially now that Kazakhstan is about to sue him and the new movie is going to be released. There would be television cameras aplenty. Maybe Borat could set up a steaming pot outside Pittsburgh and throw in life-size posters of current NFL stars. Then utter some garbled homily and voila, some drunk Pittsburgh fan would attack him and the curse would exist. Perfect.

4. The creators of Tecmo Super Bowl: If you told any video game player in the 1980s that after creating Tecmo Super Bowl, Tecmo would curl into the fetal position and allow an obscure computer game called Madden to become the only official NFL video game, you would have been called an idiot. Don't you know those Tecmo guys are sitting in an Internet café somewhere in San Francisco spitting out their coffee every time they see a Madden advertisement? Yeah, I thought so.

Madden Football, during the heyday of its competition with Super Tecmo Bowl for most popular football video game

5. Your friend who doesn't play video games and hates them: My friend's name was Ian Scott. He would sit and passionately curse video games for hours while everyone else played. Everyone has a friend like this. Usually this guy has parents who don't like television, and when he grows up, this friend's house will be full of Native-American artifacts. There is a 100 percent chance this guy will also have a dreamcatcher on the wall. This means he definitely believes in curses.

6. Tony Kornheiser: Kornheiser has been taking aim at Madden by suggesting that Kornheiser '08 is in the works. Indeed. Isn't it only a matter of time until Kornheiser takes the next step and lays down the curse gauntlet?

7. Me: Honestly, I'm still bitter that the NFL sold the exclusive rights to their video games to EA. Not that I dislike Madden, but this decision completely curtails innovation. For a sport like the NFL that trumpets Americana, isn't it extremely anti-American to stifle all competition and allow only one company to produce a game? I can see this happening with FIFA in France, but in America with the NFL? For shame NFL, for shame.

I'll give these other guys until the Ole Miss-Mississippi State game on Nov. 25 to provide an appropriate curse. If they don't act, then I'm going to curse Madden to high heaven on the final stop of the DDT. It will be the equivalent of declaring for the NFL Draft. I'm going to go ahead and buy my pot now. All ingredient suggestions delivered via e-mail will be considered with the appropriate level of respect and consideration a legitimate cursing demands. We owe the game no less.

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