It’s that time of year again.
For many football fans, the offseason can feel interminably long. Basically from the moment the draft concludes, we enter a football famine until the training camp and preseason give us the small morsel needed in our football starved bellies to satiate us until the regular season feast begins on Thursday, September 7. And out of all the offseason milestones — the schedule release, OTAs, arguments on Twitter every time some rando ranks your favorite player too low on his top-five list — one of my personal favorites are the annual Madden ratings announcements.
Like many people who play Madden, I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the game. It’s a frustrating game that always feels like it never lives up to its potential and often finds new and creative ways to infuriate me every time I play. In all these ways, being a Madden player is kinda like being a Minnesota Vikings fan. The only difference being in one of these two things my dreams of a Vikings Super Bowl win actually gets fulfilled.
Numerically quantifying every NFL player by both their tangible and intangible traits is a herculean task. And while I sympathize with that struggle, that doesn’t stop me from raking the Madden Evaluators over the coals every time they make a mistake. And mistakes are not uncommon.
So what can we learn from Madden’s numerical grades? Is it a perfect formula for simulating how many games we’ll win this season? Is it a perfect hierarchy of how players should be evaluated? Absolutely not. But at the very least, they got one thing perfectly right.
Jefferson finally gets his 99 Overall
Around this time last year, I wrote a piece about Justin Jefferson’s Madden rating and how ludicrous it was. For those who blocked it out of their brains because it was so ridiculous, entering last season Justin Jefferson was a 93-overall rating. That made him the sixth-highest-rated receiver in the game behind Davante Adams (99), Cooper Kupp (98), Tyreek Hill (97), DeAndre Hopkins (96), and Stefon Diggs (95).
Well, 365 days and one of the most dominant seasons of all time by a wide receiver later, Vikings fans can feel vindicated. Justin Jefferson is now the highest rated receiver in football.
Jefferson boasts a 99 Spectacular Catch, 99 Awareness, and 98 Catching. He’s the best route runner in the game with an incredible 98 Short Route Running, and a 97 in Medium and Deep Route Running (which, hilariously, still feel a bit low). His raw Speed (92) and Acceleration (93) are good, but not game-breaking. But these scores are attempting to codify what we all see in reality: a guy who is really good at getting open and makes spectacular plays even when he’s not.
Looking back again on my own perception of Jefferson and his Madden rating last year, I wrote about how he needed to prove how dominant he truly was by taking the next step as a superstar.
“Jefferson needs to take over games. He needs to be the threat that the entire defense is scheming to beat but still cannot find a way.… He needs to turn those game-changing plays into the game-winning plays that make the Vikings legitimate contenders.”
If that was the mission, I’d say it was accomplished. Looking back at the Vikings’ 13 victories, I can’t think of a single game where Jefferson’s impact wasn’t the main reason why they won, on or off the stat sheet. He became a focal point of the offense and a nightmare for defensive coordinators in a way Vikings fans hadn’t seen since Adrian Peterson, and the 24-year-old is just getting started.
Madden didn’t overthink it. They didn’t try to be contrarian. They codified what we all can see clear as day. Justin Jefferson’s greatness simply can’t be understated. If he’s a 99, it’s only because 100-plus isn’t an option.
Perfectly rated, and well deserved.
