When EA Sports chooses an athlete to appear on the cover of the yearly Madden NFL release, bad things happen to that person. It could be an injury. It could be a poor year of play. It could even be jail time. But after last night’s Super Bowl performance from the Kansas City Chiefs and quarterback Patrick Mahomes, it looks like we can finally declare that the Madden curse is over.
After a shaky first half, Mahomes led the Chiefs to score 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter, clinching the team’s first national championship victory in half-a-century. Mahomes became the youngest player ever to win the Super Bowl MVP award – and the first player to be the big game’s MVP in the same year he appeared on the Madden cover.
The long-standing tradition of the Madden curse was already on shaky ground, after two straight years where the bad luck appeared to be dormant. Tom Brady led the Patriots to a Super Bowl victory after appearing on the cover of Madden 2018, and while Madden 19’s Antonio Brown didn’t have quite the same luck, there was nothing so terrible that season as to be considered a ‘curse.’
Now that Mahomes has had a record-setting MVP performance in the Super Bowl, it seems it’s finally time to call an end to the Madden curse. The Chiefs and EA are certainly both ready to.
"Madden curse" lol 😂 pic.twitter.com/qWgen4KAPK
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) February 3, 2020
What’s a Madden Curse? #SuperBowlLIV
— Electronic Arts (@EA) February 3, 2020
Madden 20’s Super Bowl prediction was also on the money – at least for the winners, the score was a little off the mark. Maybe we should put it under the simulation games genre, now that EA’s franchise is done hurting the people on its cover.