History VideoGame / MaddenNFL

** In ''23'', AI controlled teams in franchise mode will refuse to pay their elite quarterbacks (Justin Herbet, Lamar Jackson, etc., who typically get long-term deals in the $300+ million range) and allow them to hit free agency... where other teams will ''also'' balk at that price and not sign them, all while the player doesn't budge on his desired compensation. Apparently, in most cases, it is because a deal of that magnitude would put the team over the salary cap. In real life, other players would be released or have their contracts adjusted to fit the quarterback's deal. The fact that all of this happens really kills any realism in franchise mode. After a few seasons, the very best quarterbacks will sit on the free agency list (unless the human player signs them) while far lesser quarterback start throughout the league.

* InMemoriam: ''Madden 25'' (the game released in 2013) is dedicated to Pat Summerall, John Madden's longtime broadcasting partner, who died about four months before the release date. %% Do not add Madden 23 memorializing John Madden himself until EA confirms elements beyond the cover.

* InkSuitActor: The players and coaches, obviously. ''13'' adds polygon versions of CBS announcers Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, along with John Madden himself. ''20'' introduces Superstar KO, including as coaches celebrities like Lil' Yachty and Music/DJKhaled, as well as Jennifer Welters, the first female coaching intern in NFL history. See also "Lethal Joke Character" below.

** Quarterbacks are deliberately slowed down behind the line of scrimmage (below what their ratings would otherwise allow for) to improve the effectiveness of pass rushers, and to avoid unrealistically productive scrambling. In ''Madden 20'', this is negated by specific superstar abilities.

** Poor, poor Bob Sanders. After several years of season-ending injuries in Real Life, the Colts safety and former Defensive Player of the Year was given a "Durability" rating in the '40s. When he appeared in the ''Madden 11'' demo, it was rare for him to finish the game even with quarters shortened to two minutes.

** If two teams are tied for a playoff berth at the end of the season, ''Madden'' can on occasion screw up the tiebreaker rules and award the playoff berth to the wrong team. It's right a vast majority of the time, but more than one player has RageQuit their online franchise when they got screwed this way. To a degree, this is forgivable as it is a rare scenario and the NFL rules for breaking ties are complicated, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_playoffs#Breaking_ties with no fewer than 12 criteria for doing so]]. (#2 on the Conference tiebreak side is where ''Madden'' usually screws up, with going to #3 even if one team has the head-to-head advantage over the other two.) However, it isn't completely consistent between different iterations of ''Madden'' either, so you never know what will happen if your team ends the season tied with another team.

** After a successful field goal, the stadium jumbotrons will show an animation incorporating the video game's kicking meter.

* InMemoriam: ''Madden 25'' (the game released in 2013) is dedicated to Pat Summerall, John Madden's longtime broadcasting partner, who died about four months before the release date. %% Do not add Madden 22 or 23 memorializing John Madden himself until EA confirms.

** They also included a TakeThat to themselves in ''Madden 2011''. In ''10'', if you scored an unbelievable amount of points, you would receive a message saying to stop scoring before you 'break' the game. The achievement unlocked for beating another team by at least 59 points in Madden 2011 is named "Did I Break It?" [[note]]59 points was the largest margin of victory in the 2009 NFL season: Patriots over Titans, Week 6.[[/note]]

** Starting with ''15'', the free agent listing only shows you the top 30 or so free agents at a position by rating, or the top 100 overall at any position. If a player below that threshold gets cut, they are effectively [[PermanentlyMissableContent lost]] because no means exist to locate them and sign them.

** In the [=PS2/Xbox=] era (roughly ''01'' to ''06''), AI controlled teams in Franchise Mode would hold on to players like they were made of diamond-encrusted gold, and free agency would mean slim pickings all around. They apparently overcompensated in the next generation because, starting with ''07''[='s=] Franchise Mode, there exists a phenomenon that can only be called "Roster Musical Chairs".

** If two teams are tied for a playoff berth at the end of the season, ''Madden'' can on occasion screw up the tiebreaker rules and award the playoff berth to the wrong team. It's right a vast majority of the time, but more than one player has RageQuit their online franchise when they got screwed this way. To a degree, this is forgivable as it is a rare scenario and the NFL rules for breaking ties are complicated, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_playoffs#Breaking_ties with no fewer than 12 criteria for doing so]]. (#2 on the Conference tiebreak side is where ''Madden'' usually screws up.) However, it isn't completely consistent between different iterations of ''Madden'' either, so you never know what will happen if your team ends the season tied with another team.

* DumpStat: Counterintuitively, many ''Madden'' players prefer their quarterback's Awareness rating to be as ''low'' as possible despite it having one of the biggest impacts on their overall rating. While Awareness plays a major part in how well players perform when not actively controlled, it is largely irrelevant with the human player in control. On offense, the quarterback will almost always be controlled by the human until they've passed the ball, meaning that the throwing ability and athleticism ratings will be far more important. With a lower Awareness, quarterbacks will be cheaper to trade for, cheaper to re-sign to new contracts, and go lower in fantasy drafts. Naturally, this makes raw-but-physically talented rookie [=QBs=] very popular as they will have low Awareness due to their lack of experience, but in the hands of the human player, will be able to perform just as well as similarly talented players but higher overall players. Note that this does ''not'' apply for simulating games.

* ScriptBreaking: Creator/JonBois of sbnation.com once had a weekly series called "Breaking Madden", wherein he created wildly unrealistic scenarios to see how the AI handled it. Often times, the game didn't know what to do with the absurdly overpowered humans he creates, including one scenario where punter Pat [=McAfee=] was made so absurdly strong that he would have ''booted the opening kickoff out of the stadium if he hadn't hit the invisible sky wall.''

** ''Madden'' has never implemented the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_catch_kick Fair Catch Kick]] rule, which allows a team that makes a fair catch to attempt an uncontested field goal from that spot. Admittedly, it's a rarely invoked rule but it 'is' a rule.

** After Steve Young's and Barry Sanders' relatively surprising retirements, EA left them in the game but simply added them to the free agent pool, available for any team to sign. There's nothing like adding Hall of Fame players with ratings in the 90s to nuke the competition.

** John Madden himself appeared on the covers, usually alone, until ''01''. Since then, players have been featured exclusively.

** Ratings will sometimes be added or altered from year to year without a clear explanation of what they do, or how they affect other ratings. For example, "Awareness" vs. "Play Recognition", "Route Running" vs. "Agility", or any of the **five** run-blocking attributes: "Run Block Rating", "Impact Blocking", "Run Block Power", "Run Block Footwork", or "Lead Blocking".

* LogicBomb: Proven possible by [[http://www.sbnation.com/breaking-madden SBnation.com's "Breaking Madden" series]] which uses player creation settings (5'0" 400 lb. QB "BEEFTANK"), roster settings (a team of all Tom Bradys) and unusual play calling (only punts and fake punts) to get the CPU "clearly so fed up with [the] silly adjustments that it stopped trying to create a realistic simulation". The results: lopsided scores and hilarious [=GIFs=] of players hit in the head by balls, giving piggyback rides, leaving for Gatorade mid-play, and even having their head spin (vertically).

[[caption-width-right:350:The best strategy in winning this game is to score more points than the opposing team.\\

[-John Madden himself returning to the cover for the first time since 2000 as a tribute to his passing in 2021.-]]]

[-John Madden himself returning to the cover for the first time since 2000 as a tribute to his passing in 2022.-]]]

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/madden_nfl_22.jpg]]

[-The cover athletes of the most recent title, ''Madden NFL 22'', are Patrick Mahomes (left; QB, Kansas City Chiefs) and Creator/TomBrady (QB, Tampa Bay Buccaneers).-]]]

Still, the franchise has some detractors (mainly because, by this point, they've run out of things to add, so the latest sequels are more like roster updates). The most notable incident happened in 2005, when it was announced that the ''Madden'' games would be the only football games allowed to use current NFL players and teams for (at least) the next few years. While many people [[{{Misblamed}} blamed EA for buying out the license because they couldn't handle competition]], the truth is that the NFL was going to give one franchise or the other exclusivity; the venerable ''Madden'' franchise simply won the bidding war.

* CreatorProvincialism: The game is developed by the EA subsidiary Tiburon, which is based in Florida. There have been complaints dating back decades that the players for the Florida-based NFL teams receive higher ratings than their performances suggest. (This was even more evident in the now-defuct ''VideoGame/NCAAFootball'' sister series regarding Florida's major universities.)

** The controls for audibles and hot routes have been reassigned somewhat throughout the years. This is particularly painful, as players may need to hustle through several of them prior to the snap.

* FakeBalance: Special teams has long been an area where the series has struggled to find the right balance of realism and fun. One year, it might be so laughably easy to return kickoffs for touchdowns that it happens at least once per game. The very next, you might go entire seasons without returning a single one. The inability to block kicks was also an issue for the first several decades of the game's existence. It wouldn't be until ''Madden 17'' that a mechanic to aid in this process was finally added. (And it didn't take long for some players to abuse it to the point of blocking nearly ''every'' kick...) The quest for special teams balance goes on.
* FakeShemp: Bill Belichick is not a member of the NFL Coaches Association, and so in every game after Madden 2002 he's been replaced in game as Patriots Coach by a generic looking guy who vaguely looks like him, usually called Chad Masters or Griffin Murphy.

*** The second related to "Progressive Fatigue," a system which would cause players to get more tired during the season if they practiced too frequently. The AI coaches would drive all their starters to exhaust by practicing like a DrillSergeantNasty, which meant by December the majority of AI teams were down to their backups.

* GodModders: Extremely common in tournament and online play. The most famous example being "Joke" fielding a team[[note]]The tourney allowed players to customize a team using a fictional salary cap[[/note]] in the 2020 Madden Bowl with 8 offensive lineman, two Hall of Fame talents in the backfield[[note]]Franco Harris at FB and Gale Sayers at HB[[/note]], and ''punter'' Tress Way as his QB. After he won the tournament 'without attempting a single pass', the game was reported even in national media like ''USA Today'' and ''The Washington Post''.

* InformedAttribute: One of the issues the series has struggled with since its inception is the relationship between a quarterback's stated attributes and actual quarterback play. Over the years, specific abilities have become more discernable and differentiated (Michael Vick was faster than Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes could throw the ball farther than Chad Pennington could, etc), but the core issue is that the player always controls the quarterback, and so QB performance is fundamentally about player skill instead of the quarterback's in-game ratings. A skilled player controlling a crummy quarterback can have much better outcomes than a lesser player controlling a Hall of Famer. The series has tried various things to close this gap (the QB Vision Cone being the most prominent), but without much success.

* InformedAttribute: One of the issues the series has struggled with since its inception is the relationship between a quarterback's stated attributes and actual quarterback play. Over the years, specific abilities have become more discernable and differentiated (Michael Vick was faster than Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes could throw the ball farther than Chad Pennington could, etc), but the core issue is that the player always controls the quarterback, and so QB performance is fundamentally about player skill instead of the quarterback's fundamental ratings. A skilled player controlling a crummy quarterback can have much better outcomes than a lesser player controlling a Hall of Famer. The series has tried various things to close this gap (the QB Vision Cone being the most prominent), but without much success.

** For several iterations in the mid-2000s, it was possible to take manual control of defensive linemen before the snap and align/stack them in ways which break the offense's blocking AI, creating unblockable blitzes. ''Madden 08'' {{nerf}}ed this by moving these players back to their original position once you switch manual control away from them.

Developed by Creator/ElectronicArts, ''John Madden Football'', later shortened to simply '''''Madden NFL''''', is the namesake of coaching legend John Madden, an UsefulNotes/AmericanFootball game based on the UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague that has, since 1988, been released annually, and always falls among the top sellers of gaming each year. It's praised for [[ShownTheirWork its realistic level of play]], to the point where the latest edition is frequently used to predict the outcome of big games up to and including the UsefulNotes/SuperBowl.

* ArtifactTitle: John Madden no longer appears on the cover since the ''01'' edition, nor does he do the in-game commentary since the ''09'' edition. In ''13'', however, he returns as an InkSuitActor as the coach of the Canton Greats all-star team and in ''20'', he received his own team in Superstar KO mode.

* InMemoriam: ''Madden 25'' is dedicated to Pat Summerall, John Madden's longtime broadcasting partner, who died about four months before the release date.

** Gus Johnson's commentary track also includes his (in)famous line "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLqGDuLnVUw He's got gettin' away from the cops speed!]]"

** The AI players will often react to things they shouldn't be able to see, meaning many plays which rely on that deception don't work in the game they way they should in real life.

* FrothyMugsOfWater: In owner mode, the user can set concession prices for every product a stadium sells, excepting beer.

** In individual career mode for ''Madden 20'', the game would sometimes begin assigning the player goals that did not correspond to the position they played (i.e. passing touchdowns for a defensive player). They player would naturally fail these goals week after week until they were cut from their team.

*** The second related to "Progressive Fatigue," a system which would cause players to get more tired during the season if they practiced too frequently. The AI coaches would drive all their starters to exhausting by practicing like a DrillSergeantNasty, which meant by December the majority of AI teams were down to their backups.

** The game will update throughout the year with appropriate decorations. October gives you breast cancer month ribbons and pink-wearing crowds, the holidays puts Christmas lights on the scoreboard, etc. It can get a little outlandish during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, where a user-created coach will be shown wearing an all-pink business suit.

** Poor, poor Bob Sanders. After several years of season-ending injuries in Real Life, the Colts safety and former Defensive Player of the Year was given a "Durability" rating in the 40's. When he appeared in the ''Madden 11'' demo, it was rare for him to finish the game even with quarters shortened to two minutes.

** The QB Vision Cone, added for ''06'', was an attempt at at a nerf, but backfired ''spectacularly''. The tiny vision cone for Quarterbacks with a low "Awareness" could actually be used to "look off" defenders, causing them to adjust their coverage to the wrong receiver. Elite Quarterbacks with high Awareness, such as Creator/PeytonManning and Creator/TomBrady, aren't be able to do this. (The cone was removed for the seventh-generation release of ''Madden 09''.)
** A number of near-game breaker level plays have gone from abused to impractical over the years. One example were the nigh-unstoppable "play action" plays in the early-mid 2000s. Safeties, even those with maxed out awareness, would almost always bite on the play fake. This left the receiver one-on-one with the cornerback deep down the field. Racking up NFL records in points and passing yards, even on higher difficulty settings, was not unheard of when abusing this play. The effectiveness of these plays has been significantly toned down over the years, while those identified as still game-breaking frequently get nerfed via in-season patches.

** ''Madden 09'' let you import plays from that year's ''NFL Head Coach'' title.

** Another single-season example is Lamar Jackson. He went from a 76 rating at the launch of ''Madden 20'' to an 93 by the playoffs, complete with the designation "Superstar X-Factor" after playing well enough to win MVP.[[note]]He received two particularly gigantic bumps after demolishing the previous year's Super Bowl teams, the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams.[[/note]]

** This is especially prominent when playing defense. On offense, under most circumstances, you control whichever player has the ball. The other players will run their routes or block as designed, with their attributes (especially "Awareness") playing into how well they do these things. On defense, however, you can take control of any player. The ones you aren't controlling can almost certainly be expected to perform worse than they would under your control. One of the most prominent examples occurs when the opposing QB rolls out out of the pocket. Pursuing defenders have the option of either going for the QB (at which point the QB will try to pass the ball), or dropping back in coverage (at which point the QB will try to run with the ball). This is a desirable situation in real life for the offense, as it forces the defenders to choose and should leave one of the options open. However, in the game, if you are not controlling the closest pursuing defender, expect to see him get indecisive and hover in between, leaving ''both'' the pass and the run wide open. This can even happen with defenders who have maxed out Awareness.

* WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue: At the end of ''Homecoming''. [[spoiler:Devin continues to play for the Texans, and Colt happily continues coaching for the Bullfrogs. Even the minor characters get in on this: for example, coach Earl Cotes decides to move to Mathis to help out the Bullfrogs, and Guzman starts a fund to aid others incorporate their business.]]

* AnnualTitle: Though the original ''John Madden Football'' came out in 1988, the second wouldn't come until 1990. Since then, it has been an annual title without pause. They started adding the year into the title in 1994 with ''Madden 95''.

** Given that the game is licensed by the NFL and intended in every way to be a simulation of real-life football, it generally does a good job of avoiding this trope, at least for the football games themselves. Franchise mode, however, deviates significantly from real-life NFL rules. Listing every example would require its own page, but some particularly notable ones include: a 53-man roster limit at all times (NFL teams have a 90 man roster limit in the offseason), no practice squads (a 10 man group of players who can practice with the team but is barred from participating in the games unless called up to the active roster first), no customization of player or coach contracts (all contracts are back-loaded, guaranteed money is evenly spread throughout, there are no incentives, etc.), the coaching staff is generally limited to the head coach and coordinators only, etc. etc.

** Occasionally when an athlete has found himself in legal trouble, he'll get totally removed from the game until he's reinstated. This most notably happened to Michael Vick[[note]]dogfighting arrest and prison time[[/note]] and Ray Rice[[note]]domestic violence case[[/note]]. In ''Madden 20'', Tyreek Hill[[note]]domestic violence accusations[[/note]] has not been given a superstar ability despite the ratings justifying it, for the same reason.