Madden Curse strikes again with Troy Polamalu

                                     Could it be the Turducken is poisoned??

Last night, the infamous John Madden Curse struck again when the great Troy Polamalu sprained is MCL, sidelining him anywhere from 3-6 weeks.  The Madden Curse is one of the most infamous conspiracies in all of video gaming and to logically assess the problem, you have to understand the facts of it.

John Madden Football has been released on numerous consoles for over 20 years including the Nintendo Wii.  For the first ten years or so, John Madden himself was on the cover of the game until 1999 when Garrison Hearst appeared on the cover.  Hearst was a perennial pro bowler who that same season broke his ankle in a playoff game and was never the same again.  The next year in 2000, Barry Sanders was the cover athlete and he retired before the season started.  2001 saw Eddie George’s numbers rapidly decline and end his time as an elite runner.  In 2002, Daunte Caulpepper missed four games and with the exception of one spectacular season, was also never the same caliber player he once was.

In 2004, Michael Vick broke his leg and missed most of the season.  His progress as a quarterback was derailed ever since and there’s no need to mention his recent legal problems.  In 2006, Donovan Mcnabb had a hernia and missed the second half of that season.

Since 2007  things have really gotten freaky.  In 2007 Shaun Alexander came off the best season any Running Back had ever had.  He only missed six games and when he returned, was so hampered his career was pretty much over.  2008 saw Vince Young go from a promising young quarterback to a backup for a 40 year old Kerry Collins. In 2009, Brett Favre went from a retired Packer, to an unretired Jet, to a re-retired player, to a re-unretired Viking.  In short he was an 18 month one man traveling circus who caused more harm than good to his teams due to his selfishness.

This brings us to 2010.   The 2010 version featured Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald on the cover. A pretty good game on the Wii you can see a full review for Madden 2010 here.  Two quarters into the first game of the 2010 season, a freak injury sprains Polamalu’s MCL and will cost him at least three weeks of the season.  This is even more notable as he has never been seriously hurt before in his seven year career.  The other cover athlete, Larry Fitzgerald has yet to play this season and all we can do is hope for the best for him.

There is such a big concern around the curse, President Obama even took a break in his busy schedule to address the issue:

In all seriousness though, all of these players have one thing in common, all of them had avoided serious injury to that point.   Most of them were older players who had taken a lot of punishment and eventually  Murphy’s Law caught up with them.  I believe there must be some logical explanation to this phenomenon, but until something is proven, all we can do speculate.