The NFA

The "National Football Association" is the product of 20 seasons of simulation in Madden's franchise mode. Once the last real player has retired, what’s left to discover is a vast, uncharted sports universe. Through a generation of computer-generated draft classes, Madden will quietly cultivate a league that can be as deep and intricate as the NFL is today.

I get to do the fun part, piecing together the overarching narrative. After diving into the rosters of 25 franchises to uncover years of stats, standings and ratings as these fictional players improved and bounced around the league, I can tell you what's at stake for these teams heading into the 2041 season (which I'll call the NFA's 2021 season for legibility purposes).

As the seasons flew by, we got to the point where all the actual players had been gradually phased out of our league as their Madden representations grew old and retired. But in playing every single game, Cam and I had grown familiar with the fictional characters that took their place. Kobi Charles, Alex Weber and Darius Bostic, Tampa Bay Bucs players who existed solely on a save file on Cam’s Xbox, meant as much to me as Eli Manning and Odell Beckham did on my real-life New York Giants.

Preparing for each game got a little harder when we couldn't psych ourselves up on name recognition alone. You can't say things like “we've gotta be ready next week, we’re playing the Aaron Rodgers” when, on the surface, every team's roster is an unrecognizable smorgasbord of random names and ratings.

So in order to keep ourselves interested, we had to do our research. We started looking for the stories behind these mysterious opponents, checking out their stats and ratings before every game. "Watch out, the Rams have a pretty unreal safety so we should throw more short passes when we play them this week. Their offensive line is bad, though, we can expect Kobi Charles to have a field day."

These computer-generated opponents used to feel like ghost towns filled with hollow puppets, mere stand-ins for the actual NFL teams and athletes that had long since passed them by. But investigating a little deeper allowed them to become much more.

As we played them more often, they gradually turned into harbors of ever-evolving storylines. We watched as all these individual factors (like the evolution of that Rams safety) contributed to the successes and failures of the team as a whole, a bigger-picture narrative that was fun to follow as an observer.

I wrote my first real story to complete a media studies assignment. Four years and 125,000 words later, I now have an entire league for you to explore.

These teams are 20 seasons of simulation in the making. The pre-season breakdown is up, giving each franchise and player a clear identity. The season is done - I've collected all the results, and even played a few of the games myself to take these rosters out for a spin. You'll see the highlights of these games in the player profiles, under Game Tape. (I'll admit I wasn't a perfectly deist entity. See How the NFA Works for all the details about the process of making this league).

Coming soon are my post-season analyses of each team, where I share with you everything about what Madden actually had in store for these franchises in 2041.

So why should you care about the NFA?

I don’t think I’m the only one that can feel like football culture has been doused in a layer of toxic sludge sometimes. The advent of social media has given everyone a voice to share their dumb opinions, and in turn things have gotten a lot more negative.

Hot-take media, governed by armchair GMs, has made watching sports an exercise in proving points. The culture has become oversaturated with petty arguments and a nagging habit of glorifying individual players just to eagerly tear them down later.

And for me at least, every step of this process has become almost excruciating. It's bitter and predictable, and it distracts from the beautiful, nuanced game we watch on Sundays.

In a way, the NFA’s lack of humanity might actually be it’s selling point. I kind of like how these stories are birthed from a bunch of 1s and 0s. As a sports fan, I’ll sometimes catch myself viewing NFL players as mere means to an end rather than, well, actual people.

But in here, there's no harm in pretending as if winning football games is the only thing that makes the world go 'round.

These fictional athletes exist in a world with no CTE, no racism, no pandemics, no soulless corporations, no politics, no war, no death. Injuries will happen, but only as a plot device. In this fantasy-land league, the players are robots. Their value is determined by what they produce in the game of Madden and nothing else. So the story of the season between the hashmarks is the only thing that matters.

Simulation grants us the kind of naivety we often pretend to have when we talk about sports like they're a matter of life and death. Looking through these teams kind of felt like picking up the NFL as a kid again. I wasn't a worn out sports fan veteran anymore, one weighed down by toothless talking heads with incessant dead-end arguments, stubborn fans, politics, and the brutality of it all.

Now, obviously I don't think of myself as some football messiah for messing around in a Madden simulation as a dumb hobby. But in exploring an entirely new league and discovering the unique intricacies of each team, I hope I'm offering you an opportunity to cut the game down to its beautiful essence.

So dive in - follow links, compare teams & players, analyze stats, and watch a little game film to get a grasp of what's at stake in the upcoming 2021 NFA season. Hopefully you’ll fall down the rabbit hole of a project that I've had a blast creating.

Jake Willis