THE GREAT ONES NEVER LOSE. THEY JUST RUN OUT OF TIME.

BY WILL BORGER

The Rams don’t have any decent corners, so my first and fifth round picks in my Madden league’s Madden 26 draft are corners. What can I say? Like Avon Barksdale, I’m a simple man, and I want my corners. In the third round, I pick up a new QB with a rocket ship for an arm and Aaron Rodgers’ throwing motion, because I love myself. He’s not great out of the gate; it’ll take at least a season to get him up to speed. But Matthew Stafford isn’t getting younger. The o-line’s a mess, so I snag a center and a left tackle when both fall to me in the second round. I take a couple late round fliers on a couple of linebackers, neither of whom turns out to be what I need, grab an UDFA o-lineman and running back after the draft. The guy playing the Cowboys let George Pickens walk last season, so I overpaid in Free Agency because I have more money than God and Davante Adams is probably going to retire next year. I can’t just throw the ball to Puka Nacua every down. After a bunch of other trades, cuts, and depth chart trial and error, some remembered, most not, I settle in for a long season. I’m 3-3 as I write this. Not terrible, not great. Middle of the road. It’s all right. We’re rebuilding the defense. It’s going to take a season or two. My plan was to lose a bunch and end up with a top 5 pick. That part’s not going well yet. But hope springs eternal. I’m not tanking, but I’m not too worried about winning, either. We’re playing the long game.

Every year, my thirty-two man Madden league, which has been around so long that it used to be run via email (it’s now on Discord), picks up the new game, and we’re all assigned new teams. We play two games a week, which turns into about four seasons each cycle. Last year, I was my beloved Steelers. The year before, my first in the league, I suited up as the 49ers and the entire league beat me like I owed them money while I tried to make the transition from playing against the computer to playing other people with, in many cases, decades more experience than me. I didn’t do very well. Last year, I made the playoffs every season but one. There’s joy in the game well played, in improvement, in building a team that does what you want it to do.

Every cycle is its own story; every team its own project with its own strengths and flaws and needs. I spend so much time caught between learning, trying to remember what has changed, and fighting the habits of the old game while learning what works in the new. I have to remember that my friend who played the Panthers now plays the Jaguars. That my playbook has changed, often in subtle ways. That we don’t have an official Madden app this year (and since it’s October, it’s probably not coming), so there’s no access to the website we’ve used to manage our rosters outside of the game for the last several years. I learn to figure out dead cap for trades myself, to wait until I get back to my console to make offers to other GMs. To be patient. 

I still make mistakes. I’ve already cut a running back I shouldn’t have and traded a 4th round pick for another running back I don’t really need. I got distracted by his higher OVR and shiny Superstar badge. I still find hidden gems whose overall rating does not correspond to their on-field performance. I spend entirely too much time pouring over my draft board, looking for the right picks, all of which will inevitably either pay off perfectly or get snapped before the end of the first round, leaving me scrambling. I obsess over salary and bonuses and trade values and how much cap I have and who will hit free agency this year. 

My most-played game of the last three years has probably been that year’s Madden, but I’m frankly terrified to check. What does that say about me? We’re not supposed to enjoy sports games, right? Those are for normies. They’re not serious art, not the way I’m supposed to be spending my time. They are not for the aficionado, the Serious Appreciator of the Medium. These things, these rituals, these worries follow me every time I grasp my controller and boot my console and hear the announcer proclaim, in that voice whose grit and timbre I will remember on my deathbed, “it’s in the game.”

**

The best kept secret in games might be that sports games are RPGs. Players have stats. They gain experience. They level up. In Madden, younger players (and players with worse overall ratings) level faster. Once they hit 25, they require more experience to level up. Once they hit 28, the jump is so extreme that they essentially stop leveling altogether. They’ll gain a few more levels during their careers, but at that point, the improvements are minor; they are the player they are. And around 30, slowly but surely, they’ll start to regress. Eventually, time catches up with everyone. It is strange, at 35, to think of someone younger than you as old. But that is the calculus Madden’s math forces on you.

There are ways around some of this. Players with better development traits will level faster, regardless of their age. Older players who are already great can survive a few years of regression before the wheels fall off. And the better a player plays, and the better their development trait is, the less likely they are to regress. But you can only stave it off so long. Father Time comes for everyone. The only question is how long you can extend a player’s career.

Who you develop and how matters. Each week, you can have up to six players undergo Focus Training where they’ll complete minigames for extra experience. The better you score in the minigames, the more experience they’ll get. Six men on a roster of 53. 

Who do you pick? Not the old guys. Young guns, ideally with good development traits. And you’ll always have some if you draft well. But who? Is it worth training the middle linebacker with a poor development trait and a low overall if he’s already 23? 

What if you don’t have any good, young guys at the positions you need? What if your team is lousy, and you need to rebuild at several spots? Do you sign bridge guys and wait for the draft? Trade for some young stud? Pour time and effort into that 25 year old with good physical stats (which rarely increase; football players do not often get stronger or faster as they age) in the hope that in two years, you can make him really good for a couple years before he starts to regress? Is that worth it? Do you have the money to re-sign your great players even if you invest in them? 

There are no right and wrong answers, and you have no idea of or when someone will offer you a team-defining trade or who will be available in the draft two years from now. But you have to choose. What will you invest in? How will you spend your time?

**

Like my team, Madden 26 is imperfect, constantly in flux. There are new systems that don’t work properly; one bug sees several of us trigger the same pre-season storyline multiple times: once during the pre-season, and again during the regular season. Storylines often start and don’t finish. Pass rush was essentially non-existent for a couple weeks before an update fixed a previous update that so improved blocking for the offensive line that basically nobody got pressures,  much less sacks. A friend who used EA’s Team Builder to make new uniforms and logos (but nothing else) for his Carolina Panthers has to listen to the commentary teams call his team Chicago every game. Every few weeks, Title Updates drop new player likenesses, equipment, fixes to game logic, animation issues, UI bugs, updates for Ultimate Team, and round and round it goes. Madden is a live service game; it’s just one that releases every year, so how much it changes – how much it can change – between releases is limited. Sometimes, things don’t get fixed until the next game. The great ones never lose; they just run out of time.

Madden 26 took big swings, overhauling Franchise mode, reworking coaches, changing player behavior, speeding up the on-field action to get it closer to College Football, and a lot more. It wasn’t playing mistake-free football out of the gate; there were and still are several bugs, glitches, and other issues. But many of these changes are good, and you play the team you’ve got, even if you’ve got lousy corners and have to sub in a safety at linebacker. And it does get better. I had a linebacker start this cycle as a 62 overall. He’s a 68 overall now. He’s still not great. But you can see the improvement.

So much discussion around sports games revolves around whether or not the newest model is as good as the classics of yesteryear. There’s an entire cadre of middle-aged men making angry faces in YouTube thumbnails and practically frothing at the mouth to tell you why this year’s Madden isn’t as good as NFL 2K5 or Madden 08 in the hopes of nabbing those sweet, sweet outrage clicks. And they’ll be ready to do it again next year, their hair a little grayer, their face a little redder, just so you know how angry they are. After all, how could these new games be better? They’re missing features! Blocking is broken! EA has no idea what they’re doing! And there are so many people ready to parrot those opinions to you, word for word, should you disagree. And so many longtime fans, with their legion of jerseys and shelves full of sports games, can’t possibly be wrong.

**

Sometimes, when I’m sad, which is often, I’ll rewatch games and highlights from my favorite Steelers era: the early 2000s to the early 2010s. It was my first time really paying attention to the sport (my parents do not care about sports, and so I only got into football as I got older), and it was fun to watch Troy Polamalu defy the laws of physics and James Harrison terrorize opposing backfields. Those teams “only” won two Super Bowls, but I loved watching them play. Sometimes I’ll watch Super Bowl XLIII and marvel at James Harrison’s remarkable one hundred-yard pick six at the end of the first half or Santonio Holmes’ miraculous, impossible catch in the endzone. I would love to see that team play again. But I can’t. I can revisit that Super Bowl as much as I want, but I’ll never be 18 again, watching that game live in my college dorm, my nose practically pressed to the glass of my old CRT, the outcome uncertain. Time marches on, whether we want it to or not.

Getting older scares the shit out of me. Sometimes, I think about the average lifespan of men in the United States, and realize I’m about halfway there. Winter has made a home in my beard. I don’t know when that happened. It’s humbling. Sobering. I have so much that I haven’t accomplished, that I still want to do, that I am afraid I won’t be able to. I don’t want to write about video games forever. Some days, I’m not sure I ever did, but I’m good at it, and I desperately need money. I am never not working. When I was younger, I thought I had all the time in the world. Now, I live with the deep, paralyzing fear that I have wasted my life, that I will never do what I want to do, that I am too old, that I missed my shot. 

I have a choice to make, a question to answer: how will I spend my remaining time? Where will I put my effort? Will I lionize the past? Try to enjoy what’s in front of me? Give up? I don’t know, but I do know what I’m doing now can’t last forever. Something has to give. Most days, I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong choice, that I won’t do enough. But I also spent most of my life convinced I’d kill myself before I turned thirty. That I didn’t certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. But I’m still here. Somehow. I marvel at that. My wife and I bought a house recently, and realized it’s the first place I’ve ever lived where I’m not actively thinking about committing suicide. I want to live. The world is full of surprises.

A friend of mine once told me that when a game isn’t clicking for him, he says “I am going to die one day” out loud, and lets his instincts guide whether he turns the game off and moves on. I’m going to die one day. And playing a Madden from 20 years ago on the PlayStation 2 will not bring me any more joy than working a job I hate or putting my dreams on hold or drowning in regret over things left undone. Playing in my league, though, with my friends? That does. Even if some things aren’t as good as they were twenty years ago and others don’t work properly, even if I’ll have to wait for next year for some of it to be fixed. It won’t last forever; nothing does. But the measure of something good isn’t whether it endures. Nothing, and no one, outruns entropy. Nobody has ever won a race against time. Some things, some people, just last longer than others. 

**

Part of being a sports fan is learning to live with disappointment. There are thirty-two teams in the NFL. Only one team, one fanbase, is happy at the end of the year. The rest are left wondering what might have been, and hoping next year will be different. Some retreat to the memory of glories past. Others turn their eyes to the horizon. In many ways, Madden mirrors the sport it’s based on. Imperfect, buoyed by the hope that this year everything will come together perfectly, that our patience will be rewarded. Each game, each season, will inevitably be followed, replaced, by another. Father Time is undefeated. But I’ve learned to appreciate the little moments, regardless of the ultimate outcome, to find joy in small things. The great game, the moment you finally beat a rival, the perfect pass, the beautiful trade, the little moments when you can see your improvement, when you realize you have just done something that you couldn’t have before… those things make it worth it.

Each Madden has an end date, a time when the new succeeds the old, and the latter is cast aside, its place left to history. Nothing lasts. Our lives are alarm clocks waiting to go off. Nobody knows how or when, but we can control how we live, what we do, with the time we have. I didn’t need a video game to teach me that, but it has helped me understand it, feel it. The great ones never lose; they just run out of time. And I think, as my morning eases into the afternoon, I finally understand how I want to spend mine.