February 6, 2009 - A week ago, as football fans everywhere geared up for the Super Bowl, I conducted a simulation of the big game using Madden NFL 09. That's nothing new here at IGN, as I rolled out a "Madden's Picks" feature each of the final four weeks of the regular season and the final three weeks of the postseason. However, in an attempt to sim the game as accurately as possible, rather than sim the games by loading the latest roster updates and simply letting the 2008-2009 season sim in franchise mode, I chose to load the latest roster update and run a "Super Sim" of the Super Bowl game, using full 15-minute quarters, at Tampa's Raymond James Stadium, and the results were mind-blowing.

I went into my 60-minute Super Sim with an open mind, but came away perplexed.

The first time I simulated the game, I came up with a final score of 62-58 in Pittsburgh's favor, and my head just about exploded. Sure that it must have just been a game full of big plays, I went to the game stats to get a more accurate idea of how the action unfolded. What I found then made my jaw hit the floor: Willie Parker had carried the ball 64 times in the contest, racking up more than 200 rushing yards. And, Ben Roethlisberger had thrown 109 passes. Simply put, the results were ridiculous.

One look at the game stats told me that something DEFINITELY wasn't right.

Still unwilling to believe that Madden could have been so very, very wrong in its simulation of the Super Bowl, I went ahead and simmed the game five more times to see whether or not the first simulation was a fluke, or reason to be alarmed. Each of those four subsequent sims yielded significantly divergent final scores, which is an issue I'll get back to later in this piece, but each game featured a similarly unbelievable number of snaps, typically between 350 and 400. To put that in perspective, there were 137 plays run in Super Bowl XLIII.

When Dennis Dixon, the Steelers' third-string quarterback, throws 66 passes in a game, you know something's very wrong.

Now, I know that Madden NFL 09 is tuned specifically for 5-minute quarters, which is the default quarter length for both Franchise Mode and Play Now, but how can a game that is generally regarded as providing a very accurate simulation miss the mark so completely when it comes to simming a full-length football game? After all, Madden was 36-27 in picking winners from Week 14 forward (no, we didn't ask it to pick against the spread), and 6-1 in the playoffs (3-1 in the Divisional Playoffs, 2-0 in the Conference Championships and 1-0 in the Super Bowl).

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