ANYway. The cover of the Madden games generally have a super good player on it (Brady has never agreed to let his likeness be used for the cover, weirdly enough, even in his MVP seasons); Brett Favre, Larry Fitzgerald, Troy Polamalu, Vince Young...all fantastic players at one point in their careers, and all cover players. They're usually just chosen by Electronic Arts (EA), in terms of who gets to go on the cover; Madden 11 was Drew Brees, QB of the Super Bowl champions New Orleans Saints. He had a pretty fantastic season, culminating in a SB win, so he definitely deserved it. EA decided to do something a little differently this year, though, and put the choice of who would appear on the cover in the hands of the fans; you can go to a certain site and vote for your candidates. They had 32 ppl, going 'head-to-head' with each other, and you would vote for each battle, until there was only one. Well, we have two finalists...and it's probably not who you would think. You would imagine that the most popular players would be in the finals, and I expected Michael Vick, QB of the Philadelphia Eagles and convicted criminal (he's a reformed man! more on that later, lol) vs. Aaron Rodgers, QB of the 2010 Super Bowl Champions Green Bay Packers, former backup to legendary Brett Favre.
Nope. Well, I was half right; Vick is there, but in the semi-finals, Peyton Hillis, a relatively unknown running back who had a pretty stellar season this past year, beat Rodgers for the chance to face Vick. People are crediting the internet fans of Hillis and the Cleveland Browns (the team he's on) for this weird phenomenon, but you can't help but think this is bad business for EA. In an article by IGN (which can be found here), the author writes how EA screwed itself; now they HAVE to put either an unknown random (even though Hillis is gaining notoriety, he doesn't have as much star power as Rodgers or someone else might have), or a star in Vick...but someone who has been convicted for a criminal offense, and who will have animal rights activists up in arms about having him on the cover.
Now, if I had to choose (I voted for Hillis just to spite EA, because, honestly? eff those guys and their awful games...but I'm going to buy Madden 12 anyway, hehe), I would actually choose Vick. Why? Because apart from Rodgers, he's probably the only candidate in that list of 32 candidates who had any sort of credence to being on the cover (that's a lie, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers and Adrian Peterson all have legitimate claims too). He WAS on the cover before, actually, before he went to jail, back when he was the QB for the Atlanta Falcons. Still, though. He would be a fantastic choice.
I should also say, I brought this up today with a friend of mine. He seems to think that Vick should not be on the cover, if only because he IS a convicted criminal, convicted (conVICKted? lolol) of an offense that is horrible beyond belief...creating and running a dogfighting ring. Oh, wait, that's not horrible at all! Seriously, I don't understand why Vick's crime (and it IS a crime, I'm not saying it's not) is so bad. He didn't murder a human, another one of our kind. Again, he did commit a criminal offense. Yes, he did. He abused the fact that he was a bajillionaire, and lost the respect of so many millions of young people (myself included, at the time), by basically throwing everything he had away. And guess what? He served his time, a 23-month sentence in a federal prison, and tried his best to regain his status, giving one of his best seasons as an NFL quarterback this past year. Still, though. He did not murder any dogs himself; he financed the operation (duh, he's a millionaire). He funded/facilitated/promoted it, but didn't kill any of them himself...and he still served time for it. I just don't get why people are STILL up in arms about this. The purpose of prison (or, more tellingly, a 'correctional facility') is to, well...correct the bad behaviour in people. From what I can see, Vick is a changed man; he's done so much good since being released from prison, and being on the cover of Madden isn't going to suddenly cause more dogs to be killed.
I mean, had he killed a person, I would understand people saying 'oh, this inhuman monster! How dare EA put a murderer on their cover?'. But...he didn't. He was somewhat involved in the killing of dogs in a fighting ring. Yeah, that's bad...but not that bad.
Ah well. In the end, I'm going to buy the game, regardless if Vick or Hillis is on it.
Here are some links, btw:
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