The Madden Curse
Get on the cover of Madden, get hurt. From Garrison Hearst's ankle to Michael Vick's leg to Shaun Alexander's foot, a decade of cover athletes made fans build a website begging EA to leave their guy alone.
Until 1998 every Madden cover had John Madden on it. That year EA put 49ers running back Garrison Hearst on the European edition of Madden NFL 99, and Hearst broke his ankle on the first play of the January 1999 divisional playoff in Atlanta when his foot caught in the Georgia Dome turf; doctors said he might never play again. From Eddie George on Madden NFL 2001, over Madden's own objections, a star player got the cover every year, and the pattern started to look like a pattern. George averaged under three yards a carry in 2001. Daunte Culpepper, the Madden 2002 cover, hurt his knee in December 2001 and missed the last five games of a 5–11 season. Marshall Faulk's Rams went 7–9 the year he was on the box. Michael Vick, the Madden 2004 cover, broke his right fibula in a preseason game and missed the first eleven games.
The idea had a name by the time Donovan McNabb, the Madden 06 cover, played the 2005 season with a sports hernia and finished it on injured reserve, and Shaun Alexander, the reigning MVP with a record 28 touchdowns, went on the Madden 07 cover and broke his foot in Week 3. "Do you want to be hurt and on the cover, or just hurt?" Alexander asked. Fans of LaDainian Tomlinson built SaveLTfromMadden.com to keep him off Madden 08; he declined the cover, and later said it was only about contract negotiations. Brett Favre's Madden 09 cover shipped with him retired in a Packers uniform and had to be patched with a downloadable Jets version when he came back.
EA's Chris Erb said, "I don't know that we believe in the curse. The players don't believe in the curse." Bookmakers posted odds on the cover athlete getting hurt anyway, and when EA let fans vote for the cover starting with Madden 11, the company suspected many were voting against their own favorites. Peyton Hillis, the Madden 12 pick, blamed his bad year on it outright. The skeptics' answer is that football hurts everybody: Calvin Johnson set the receiving-yards record on the Madden 13 cover, Tom Brady won the MVP on Madden 18, and Patrick Mahomes won a Super Bowl on Madden 20. EA announced a comedy film about the curse in 2010 and had quietly dropped it by 2014, which, given the subject, feels about right.
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