Madden NFL’s Super Bowl prediction wrong seven out of ten times now

EA Sports gets it wrong for the third year in a row

Marco Wutz | Feb 13, 2023

Madden NFL’s Super Bowl prediction wrong seven out of ten times now /

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The Kansas City Chiefs clinched a 38-35 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII, taking their third Super Bowl championship after the 1969 Season and 2019 Season.

Quarterback Patrick Mahomes was awarded Super Bowl MVP for the second time, once again playing a critical role in securing the championship rings for the team. This achievement means that Mahomes has become the first player in NFL history to be Super Bowl MVP, season MVP, season leader in passing yards, and season leader in passing touchdowns at the same time.

The Chiefs’ win contradicts the prediction made by EA Sports and Madden NFL 23, which had the Eagles coming out on top 31-17 with a middling performance by Mahomes – basically as far a miss as possible, as the quarterback provided crucial contributions even after reaggravating his hurt ankle.

This is the third year in a row that Madden’s prediction turned out to be false. In the last ten years, the American football sim only got the result right three times, as the historical data shows.

Two out of three Super Bowls starring the Kansas City Chiefs featured a wrong prediction: EA correctly tapped them to win against the San Francisco 49ers, but did not predict their loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or their win over the Eagles.

That said, our own Super Bowl LVII prediction, which used Madden NFL 23 to simulate the encounter between the Chiefs and the Eagles not just once, but 100 times, did have the Kansas City Chiefs come out on top overall, winning 57 out of 100 matches. Perhaps EA Sports should also look into using a higher sample size to enhance the accuracy of its own predictions in the future.

Unlike Madden’s shoddy Super Bowl predictions, EA Sports’ FIFA 23 got the soccer World Cup 2023’s winner completely right – the fourth correct prediction in a row for the FIFA series.

Published Feb 13, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg