Not as fun, or funny, as real football

In October 2016, the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals played a football game.

Was it good? Absolutely not. Did it matter? In the grand scheme of things, not particularly. But for one Sunday night, in the weeks leading up to a gut-wrenching presidential election, the NFL accidentally stumbled onto something magical to distract a divided nation for a few hours: A 6-6 tie.

It was like both teams were allergic to victory. In the overtime period, both kickers missed potential game-winning field goals that every single NFL kicker could nail in their sleep to cement a four hour dud I can still remember five years later because it was weird.

Football is at its best when nothing makes sense. The architects of the game knew what they were doing when they settled on an oblong ball that can bounce unexpectedly at any time, rather than a spherical one. For a sport so frequently presented as a modern-day gladiatorial spectacle, its rampant stupidity is what makes it special.

I just wish Madden NFL 22 reflected that.

The latest in EA’s wildly profitable annual franchise is mostly on point in the look-and-feel department, with each of the league’s stadiums rendered beautifully to go along with broadcast-quality commentary and intimidatingly loud crowd noise in certain circumstances. The part where you play football is fine, too, I guess. EA says there are improvements to things like catch animations and offensive line protection, but as someone who plays Madden semi-casually as a therapeutic exercise every year because the games aren’t real and don’t have stakes, the differences feel marginal.

Football is at its best when nothing makes sense.

Even with all that being true, though, I’ve been excruciatingly bored with it because it just doesn’t have the pervasive strangeness that makes the real game so compelling to me. The real teams and players are all here, but they’re silent virtual puppets without any of the narrative soul that unfurls throughout an NFL season.

I’ve prepared a list of some of my favorite goofy moments from recent NFL history that Madden doesn’t or can’t recreate in a satisfying manner:

I could rattle off more of those for hours, but you get the point. There’s so much context around any given NFL game that makes it more interesting than just a series of runs and passes over four quarters.

To be fair, Madden does allow for fun trick plays like the legendary Philly Special from Super Bowl LII, and people have even recreated the aforementioned Butt Fumble in the game before. The Franchise mode that makes up the bulk of the single-player progression each year also allows for some procedural silliness, like teams randomly moving to London after a handful of simulated seasons.

But for me personally, all of that loses a ton of juice because Madden doesn’t show you much of a world outside what happens on those 100-yard fields. The Butt Fumble wasn’t just funny because a guy ran into his teammate’s rear end; it was hilarious because the New York Jets are hapless and cocky at the same time, and it happened in an embarrassing loss to the New England Patriots death machine on national TV on Thanksgiving. Everyone saw it.

Jets fans aside, the entire NFL fan community has reveled in it for a decade. If it happens in Madden, it just registers as a turnover on the stat sheet and the game moves on. As I mentioned earlier, Franchise mode presents the best opportunities for hilarity like that in Madden, but after a few hours, I’m just not feeling it this time around.

This year’s game gives players the option to progress through careers both as real players or coaches, or as an avatar they create upon starting the game for the first time. This “Face of the Franchise” mode stars your created player as a college star turned rookie phenom with a series of incredibly stiff and awkward cutscenes leading up to the NFL Draft. You’ll go to Nike HQ to get a signature shoe deal, attend a charity game in Hawaii with real star players who rather creepily don’t talk at all, and even try to impress a fake assistant coach at a pre-draft workout session.

Absolutely none of that is engaging. You’ll occasionally make dialogue choices that boil down to one of three or four generic pro athlete responses to questions about leadership or greatness and it’s impossible to care. For instance, I was given a choice to “be self-assured” or “be humble” when presented with the information that my first opponent, the lowly Houston Texans, were a beatable team.

The only one that comes close to what I want out of a football game is when you get to choose your pose in the pre-draft red carpet photoshoot, because that has the potential to be endearing and human. It’s something a fresh-faced 22-year-old might have some fun with. Unfortunately, in the few hours of this mode I’ve played, it’s been an outlier.

Remember, these are human beings with personalities and flaws, in a sport where a player’s draft position tumbled because someone hacked his social media and posted a video where he was smoking weed out of a gasmask bong. Madden depicts a world where nothing like that ever happens.

This is a game simulating adults who play a game for a living, so have some fun with it!

I’d love a version of Madden with some real narrative variability. No joke, I’d get a huge kick out of virtually feuding with a fake head coach because he won’t start my created character for petty reasons, or getting in trouble for acting a little too rowdy during a Super Bowl celebration like Tom Brady did earlier in 2021. This is a game simulating adults who play a game for a living, so have some fun with it!

A good chunk of my boredom with Madden NFL 22 definitely comes from me getting older and learning to appreciate sports in a different way. A decade ago, I was content with just the aesthetic excellence of tightrope passes and lockdown defense, with the glory of victory as depicted in the over-the-top NFL Films style with cinematic footage and sweeping orchestral music.

That stuff still works for me to an extent, but now I see the players less as superheroes and more as people. A football field is a place where the gamut of human emotions and behavior can play out for four quarters, but without the context of what it took to get there and what happens afterward, a game is just a game.

When my beloved Kansas City Chiefs finally won a Super Bowl in 2020, it wasn’t just compelling because they hadn’t done it in 50 years. The mix of comedy and tragedy that transpired over those 50 years mattered: Alleged wiretapping scandals, a playoff loss where both offenses were so elite that neither team punted once, the slowest QB on earth somehow running 76 yards past an entire defense.

Every NFL team has deep lore like this, even in prolonged periods of mediocrity. Two fans who otherwise have nothing in common can say the name of some forgettable QB from the ’90s and have a quick laugh about it. It’s a huge ask for any video game to recreate that feeling, but it’s the feeling that makes football special to me.