FAKE RONJAN!!The Madden Curse from a different angle
The Madden video game cover is always a hot topic. It's the most prestigious sports game cover, at least in this country, and ESPN has been running a fan vote (March Madness-style) for the past three years in order to determine who wins the honor. We even had an office pool, just for fun, and Chris and I both recovered from rough starts to take the top two spots, having both predicted Barry Sanders to beat Adrian Peterson in the final:
That's all fun and games, but the biggest Madden cover topic is definitely the Madden Curse. Surely you are familiar with it at this point, but the basic idea is that the player who is chosen for the Madden cover each year is "cursed" to have a sub-par season, get injured, or both.
There have been countless articles detailing whether this is a "real" impact or just simple regression to the mean, since the cover athlete is usually a player who just had a great season. So I don't have a ton to add to this ... at least not right now. (Hey, we've got to save some good stuff for next year, right?)
I just thought it might be worthwhile to explore a slightly different angle. All of the Madden Curse analysis is on the player's statistical contributions and his health, but I thought it might be equally interesting to see what happens to his respective team's performance in the year he's on the cover. Does this "curse" impact the whole team?
In a word, yes.
All but one team failed to advance further in the cover year as they did in the previous year, and none of these teams won more playoff games in the cover year as in the previous year! (Only the 2006 Seahawks and 2009 Cardinals even won a single playoff game in the cover year.)
Now, of course, there's still a "regression to the mean" factor at play here, one probably one worth exploring further down the line -- either for this or for a broader question.
But the bottom line here is clear. It's not just the player on the cover who is cursed -- it's all of his teammates too.
So if you're on Barry Sanders's flag football team this year ... get ready to lose.
-rj