Perhaps the most highly anticipated video game every year is the Madden NFL series from EA Sports. For more than 20 years, this franchise has been an undeniably big hit. Every year, the EA Sports team visits the NFL draft in order to get head-shots of the new players in their new uniforms as soon as possible. Television programs pitting some of the most talented Madden NFL players in tournaments are shown around the world. And people are known to come up with every excuse in the book in order to get out of work on the very day the game releases - making it as close to a national holiday as the video game industry is likely to get.
You might also think that players are honored and delighted to be featured on the game's cover. For the 12 years Madden has been boasing an annual cover athlete, those athletes chosen seem to either play poorly that year, or suffer serious and season-ruining injury.
In the first week of the 2009 season, the Madden curse had already reared it's ugly head. Madden 10 was the first one to feature two cove athletes instead of just one. Troy Polomalu was shown head-to-head with a man he covered in Super Bowl XLIII; Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals. In the Steelers' first game of the season against the Tennessee Titans, Polamalu suffered a medial collateral ligament sprain while blocking a field goal. He missed the rest of the seson.
One would think that everyone in the league would have learned to avoid Madden by now. Players a) don't need the money and b) are quite superstitious in the best of times, so you'd think they'd just decline the offer from EA sports. Histroy has taught us that the negative effect of being on the Madden cover, for whatever scientific or non-scientific reason, is a real thing.
Some Hisrotical Examples:
2002: QB Daunte Culpepper was honored with a Madden 02 cover appearance folliowing his team's final four appearance in 2000. He followed this up by missing the last five games of the 2001 season with a hurt knee, and his team missed the playoffs.
2003: Marking the beginning of the end of the "Greatest Show On Turf", Marshall Faulk of the Rams failed to rush for 1,000 yards in the 2001 season (for the first time since 1996) following his appearance on the cover of Madden 03 and his subsequent nagging ankle injury.
2004: Atlanta Falcons franchise QB (and a Madden player's favorite QB at the time) missed the entire 2003 season after gracing the cover of Madden 04. His team finished 5-11 (missing the playoffs of course) without him.
2006: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was coming off a Super Bowl appearance, in which his team lost to the New England Patriots. But as the Madden NFL 06 cover athlete, his 2005 was destined for disaster and he suffered a sports hernia in the first game and ended up shutting down for the last seven games of the season.
The evidence is stacking up. Whether it's just the impact on your attitude after being featured, whether it just effects your concentration in the preseason and training camp, or whether it's something more...mysterious, who knows.
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