SAN JOSE, Calif. — There was a parade through Chicago when the Cubs finally kicked their Billy Goat Curse. All of Red Sox nation celebrated when Boston reversed the Curse of the Bambino.
Is it possible the Madden Curse — not nearly as old as its baseball counterparts but perhaps more entrenched in pop culture — also has ended, and we never even realized it?
Or is more heartbreak lurking, just another bad break a season or two away?
The Madden NFL video game franchise is one of the most successful in the world. Redwood City-based EA Sports has sold around 150 million copies of a game credited with teaching legions of fans — and many current NFL players and coaches — the nuances of football because of its realistic style of play.
Just as notable has been the decades-long enigma known as the Madden Curse.
Not familiar? Simply put, it’s the explanation often suggested for the terrible injuries or abrupt declines in performance that have followed an inordinate number of players who have graced the cover of the Madden NFL game over the past 25 years.
The instances have become less frequent in recent years, largely because Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, the cover players for three of the past five editions, appear to be curse resistant. And there will be no curse this season: John Madden, the former Raiders head coach, legendary broadcaster and driving force for the video game, is back on the cover for the first time since 1998, a tribute after his death in December at the age of 85.
But historically, trouble has soon followed for the Madden cover boys.
Debates rage about which players actually have been cursed, but an argument can be made that 16 of the 24 players who have been featured on the cover got hurt, saw their performance drop off dramatically or suffered some sort of massive in-season or playoff letdown that season. That doesn’t even account for Barry Sanders, who made the cover in 1999 and shortly before that season even began, stunned the NFL by retiring while still in his prime and never played again.
Technically, the Madden Curse isn’t a curse in the fairytale — or horror movie — sense. But a lot of fans believe something is, or was, going on. When game producers opened up the cover slot to a fan vote, fans didn’t vote for their own team’s stars, they voted for their rivals, hoping for a foe’s downfall by the curse.
Players have publicly put on a brave face, with mixed results.
Brady tempted fate when he was named the cover player for Madden 18, filming a tongue-in-cheek commercial where he walked under a ladder and broke a mirror. Brady not only avoided injury, but was the league MVP that cover season. His Patriots, however, were upset by the Eagles in the 2018 Super Bowl.
Former Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander, asked about the Madden Curse when he was picked for the front of the ’07 game, replied, “Do you want to be hurt and on the cover or just hurt?” Alexander broke his foot weeks after his cover debuted and was out of the league two years later at age 31.
Publicly, only one player has declined a cover opportunity — then-Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson for the ’08 cover, but reportedly, that was over how much he’d be paid.
But players talk. And they’ve seen what has happened to so many of their colleagues.
Peyton Manning, one of the NFL’s greatest quarterbacks, who retired in 2016 after winning Super Bowl 50, devoted an episode of his ESPN+ series “Peyton’s Places” to the Madden Curse.
Manning somewhat surprisingly never made a Madden NFL cover and conceded, “I’m a little hurt that I was never asked.”
But would he have agreed?
“The answer is absolutely not,” Manning continued. “No. Freaking. Chance.”
With that, Manning and Garrison Hearst, the episode guest who posed the question, burst out laughing on the set.
Hearst, the former 49ers star running back, knows a little about the topic. To many, he was patient zero of the Madden Curse.
During the 1998 season, Hearst became the first player ever featured on a Madden NFL cover, but broke his ankle shortly after the game was released and missed the next two seasons.
Hearst developed avascular necrosis, the same condition that ended the career of Bo Jackson, who was the biggest name in professional sports — and virtually unstoppable as the star of a rival football video game — when he got hurt. But as Manning noted to Hearst, there’s no such thing as a Tecmo Bowl Curse.
Only Madden.
It wasn’t until several years following Hearst’s injury — after cover stars Eddie George, Daunte Culpepper, Marshall Faulk and Michael Vick were struck down in succession in the early 2000s — that the legend of the Madden Curse began to really take hold. The concept didn’t even have a name until Alyssa Roenigk coined the phrase in a 2002 ESPN The Magazine article.
By 2012, after Donovan McNabb, Alexander, Vince Young, Troy Polamalu and even Brett Favre and Drew Brees (to some extent) also suffered misfortunes after making the cover, the Madden Curse was part of NFL lore.
So, does Hearst believe in a Madden Curse?
“I don’t want to, because that means I’m the first one to start it,” Hearst told Manning. “But something’s going on. Look where I am, on ESPN+ (talking about it).”
Of course, not everyone buys into the curse talk, including the guy whose name has been on the box of every Madden NFL game ever sold and whose likeness was splashed across the first eight editions of the game.
“I was on the cover for several years, and I never once even pulled a hamstring,” Madden once said. “It’s a violent sport. Injuries are going to happen.”
EA Sports’ public stance was if the players didn’t think there was a curse, neither did they. But in 2010, the company reportedly began developing a comedy film based around a former star player who abruptly comes out of retirement at the same time he is on the cover of a popular video game and has to endure a series of setbacks — not unlike how Favre’s 2008 season unfolded.
In 2007, as the Madden Curse was really picking up steam, former EA Sports marketing director Christopher Erb conceded to Time Magazine, “I haven’t told this to people, but I’ve got a bottle of Champagne in my office that we’re ready to pop once someone breaks the curse.”
That bottle remained on ice for a few more years until former Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson started to reverse the curse in 2012, when, as the Madden NFL cover player, he had a career year, catching 122 passes for nearly 2,000 yards.
Brady and Mahomes have also helped tamp down curse talk in recent years. Perhaps not surprisingly, the pair of star quarterbacks are the only players to appear twice on the Madden NFL cover, including together on last year’s edition.
Mahomes gave many people reason to believe the curse was finally over after the 2019 season, when the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback not only became the first active Madden cover player to play in and win the Super Bowl, but he was the MVP in beating the 49ers.
“What Curse?” EA Sports triumphantly tweeted shortly after the game.
Only time will tell if the Madden NFL curse has really been reversed.
