Madden 24 is coming out soon. The player ratings were recently released online. Unsurprisingly, Maddenhasn’t changed anything, and still doesn’t know how to rate their players. It doesn’t matter how many times they send Chad Ochocinco to training camp with a clip board. They still haven’t come close to finding an accurate way to rate their players.
This mildly annoys the players every year. But the fans use Madden as a way to live vicariously through our favorite players. This makes the ratings piss us off an unreasonable amount. It’s for good reason though, as favorite players from every team have been thrown virtual middle fingers by the people at EA Sports.
I’ll start with my many complaints about the abomination of this game’s player rankings by looking at quarterbacks. Take a look at this list, and I’m sure you’ll find your own issues.
As a biased Eagles fan, I’ll get my issues with Jalen Hurts 88 overall rating out of the way. If you rank future Hall of Famer Russell Wilson (this is a fact) a 77, you are entirely basing your ratings off last year, which is fine. Jalen Hurts was one of the two best quarterbacks in football last year. Putting him outside the 90’s is a bigger crime to the world of sports than anything O.J. Simpson ever did.
Besides that, they think Tua Tagovailoa is better than Trevor Lawrence. They ranked Justin Herbert on the same level as Dak Prescott, and even included Lamar Jackson with the quarterbacks instead of running backs where he belongs (I’m kidding, don’t kill me Becker).
They also ranked Nick Chubb higher than every other running back in the league. What have the Madden ratings specialists seen the past few years that the rest of the world hasn’t. Derrick Henry is in the middle of a Hall of Fame career, and every other back in the league is trying to match the versatility of Christian McCaffrey.
Another thing they do that goes under the radar is spin a wheel between 60 and 70 for the overall of every backup in the league. I apologize for making this largely about the Eagles, but it’s where 85% of my NFL knowledge lies. One of their backup lineman Jack Driscoll played a lot of meaningful snaps for the team last year. He backed up several spots on the line, and played pretty good football. He is ranked below a player that was just selected in the third round of the draft. I understand this is a pretty specific gripe, but it shows Madden’s lack of focus in two specific areas: offensive lineman and backups. Considering my football career peaked in high school as a backup offensive lineman, this is terribly offensive to me.
In conclusion, I hope all EA game developers are far away from a toilet the next time they have to poop.
