KRT Wire | 09/25/2006 | Alexander a victim of Madden curse? — I had first posted an item about this here on Dvorak Uncensored in July. The comments were rather derisive. But here it is. The player featured sustains a broken foot! The major media is now picking up on the curse. Who will be next?
Alexander is the sixth consecutive athlete featured on the cover to suffer an injury that forced him to miss at least one game.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Chris Erb, who is the director of marketing for EA Sports. “We work so close with these athletes, and we root for them to succeed.”
Erb has more than a simple rooting interest in Alexander. Erb is from Seattle, attended Washington, and was at Sunday’s game against the New York Giants, having flown here to watch the Huskies on Saturday and the Seahawks on Sunday.
“Both personally and for work,” Erb said. “I’m really bummed to see Shaun go down.”
Alexander has been diagnosed with a fracture in his left foot. He is out indefinitely. He said this offseason that he didn’t believe in curses and wasn’t superstitious.
It’s not Madden in so much the hype built around specific players causes opposing teams to gun for those players.
With Shaun Alexander, he’s signed a big contract and just lost in the Super Bowl. It’s his year to either shine or fail, no middle ground.
As intelligent as my post from the old thread was, there was one factor I missed: Shaun Alexander was on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on Sunday.
How about this – what can be established about the injuries of players who might have been on the boxart but weren’t?
The box is evil I tell you!
Getting an injury that makes you miss one game is rather a low bar to hurdle. It would be more remarkable if the pictured athletes made it through a season w/o getting such an injury. Selective perception or confirmation bias rears its ugly head again.
1) A lot of players get injured and miss at least 1 game during the season.
2) The types of players they feature on the Madden box are usually players in positions that carry the ball and take more hits – running backs and quarter backs.
3) The “curse” is open to a lot of interpretation in the original article. A key fumble, a mediocre season, being injury-prone, retiring, being cut the next year. Basically, the “curse” seems to be fulfilled when one “bad thing” happens to a player sometime within a year of that season.
I usually enjoy crazy theories like this but only if they are presented well and with good evidence.