The Winner Of This Year's Madden Bowl Did Not Throw A Single Pass All Tournament And Had His Punter Taking Snaps Instead Of A QB
ESPN- In competitive Madden, Raidel "Joke" Brito is widely considered one of the greatest competitors on the sticks, with over $200,000 in career earnings, 11 EA major appearances and multiple Madden Bowl final fours, but he had never quite been able to get to the top of the mountain. That changed Saturday night at the 2020 Madden Bowl.
The 26-year-old from West New York, New Jersey, was able to use his run-only offense and particularly stingy defense en route to a 17-0 shutout of Daniel "Dcroft" Mycroft of Mukilteo, Washington, to win on Madden's biggest stage.
Joke did not throw a single pass in the entire tournament, taking advantage of the run-focused meta of the game and his skill to create a championship-winning formula. In the tournament, players crafted their rosters in a salary-cap system, with current and former NFL players available. Joke used this to his advantage, opting not to field a true quarterback in his lineup; Washington Redskins punter Tress Way was under center.
YIKES! Look, I'm all for establishing the run in all aspects of football. Real life, madden, fantasy. All of it. Shit, I'm watching a fucking RedZone broadcast from 1988 right now where running backs are being slammed into a wall of defenders every first down just to #establishtherun and I can't get enough of it.
I'm also all for calling the same play in a video game until it doesn't work. If your opponent has a problem with it, they can figure out a way to stop it. Vince Lombardi got the goddamn Super Bowl trophy named after him running the Lombardi Sweep down teams' throats on 1st Down, 2nd Down, 3rd Down, and if he felt kinky in his trench coat, 4th Down. Which is why I have no problem with this very nice Joke fella running it down these guys' throats all the way to winning this sweet ass belt.
But winning an entire Madden tournament against the best of the best without throwing the ball once and knowing you won't throw the ball because you have a punter under center (no #DISRE2PECT to the #brand) hurts the once proud Madden franchise. Don’t they know the NFL is a passing league? Watch a talking heads football show one time for me, EA! You beat General Smitty 100-0 after throwing out all the passing plays in your playbook? Fine. Coach Duggs wants to get his Lombardi on by eating a cheesehead sized cheddar block as his punter calls nothing but run plays on whatever D-III cupcake Tech gets before Big 12 season begins? I get it. But doing that against the cream of the professional Madden crop is a tough look. Luckily for EA Sports, this isn't even the toughest look in this year's game.
SUPER YIKES!
The only thing the good folks at Madden have to do to fix all this in Madden 2021 is make running tougher while also not making it impossible or making passing too easy and also making it not feel like just a roster update with a bunch of new features. Pretty simple, right? Oh yeah and release the game ASAP so we can burn away quarantine hours playing with our new free agents and draft picks in a brand new game and give All Business Pete a bunch of codes so his Twitter mentions crash his phone and computer every time he turns them on.
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