Wow, That's Some Curse!

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I cracked up reading David Freedlander in AM NY about the "uncanny" results of the curse of being on the cover of John Madden's football video game:

"But the results are uncanny. In 2000, star running back Barry Sanders was on the cover, and suddenly retired soon after the game appeared. In 2006, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, suffered a sports hernia in the first game of the season and missed half the year. Last year, football fans in San Diego started an online petition to keep star running back LaDainian Tomlinson off the cover."

What an amazing string of... Wait... one guy retired, because, you know, he wanted to, not because something bad happened to him. One set of fans freaked out about the "curse" and undertook a silly campaign... and nothing bad happened to the guy on the cover. And one guy got hurt. Which, as you know, has never happened to anyone in football who was not on the cover of the Madden NFL game.

Must have been a slow news week at AM NY.

Comments

  1. Anonymous12:03 PM

    To be fair, the Madden Curse is a pretty widely-referenced phenomenon (whether that means it's widely-believed is, of course, another question). And more than one guy got hurt: Garrison Hearst broke his ankle, Daunte Culpepper hurt his back, Michael Vick broke his leg in preseason (and, of course, things got worse from there), McNabb got hurt, and Shaun Alexander broke his foot (and was having a terrible year even before he got hurt).

    Of course, NFL players get hurt at an astonishingly high rate and it's to be expected that someone who had a phenomenal year (as anyone who's on the cover of Madden necessarily had) will regress to the mean the next year, so all of the above is pretty well within the range of expectation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wabulon12:18 PM

    There's a science fiction story about a worried observer tracking the exploits of an apparently omnipotent and goodhearted man. "Let the people on that lost plane have been all right--since yesterday. Somehow that worried him most of all."

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah2:19 PM

    Well, the reporter could have made a much better case for "uncanny" if he had listed a few more injuries!

    ReplyDelete
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