Madden 23: Predicting this year’s cover athlete

1. John Madden

The NFL truly lost a legend last year. On December 28, 2021, John Madden passed away. John Madden was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1958 but never got the chance to play in the NFL as a knee injury prevented him from getting his career underway. However, his knee injury never stopped him from making a massive impact on the NFL.

John Madden went on to be a legendary NFL coach and a legendary broadcaster. John Madden was able to coach the Oakland Raider from 1969-1978. While his coaching career wasn’t as long as some of the other coaches that we have known to love over the years, he was just as impactful as if he coached for 20 years. John Madden went on to coach 142 games to comprise a record of 103-32-7 and led the Oakland Raiders to their first ever Super Bowl in 1977. That puts John Madden at a .759 winning percentage in the NFL and the highest in history.

If it wasn’t for John Madden, we would have never gotten the Madden video games. We truly owe it all to him. There may have been NFL video games, but they wouldn’t have grown into the Madden franchise, and it is one of the highest sports video game franchises of all time. All of the Madden video games that were released from when the franchise was initially released in1988 all the way through the year 2000, John Madden was on the cover for each of the Madden games released during that time frame. 23 years since John Madden has been on the cover last, I think it is time for them to do it once again.

John Madden is my current number one choice as to who should get the honor of being on the cover this year. It only seems right, and we are way past due for a John Madden cover. The passing of John Madden was a hard pill to swallow for not only NFL fans, but tons of others around the world. This would be a great way for EA to show respect to the man who started one of the greatest and most successful video game sport franchises of all time.