As you may have heard by now, we tonight announced Brett Favre as our cover athlete for Madden NFL 09. Brett unveiled the new packaging on The Late Show with David Letterman, and I was proud to be present at the taping to see the announcement first hand.  

It is with great pride that we take the bold step of featuring a retired player on the front of packaging, an honor normally reserved for a player at the peak of his game. I say with great pride, because some may question the marketing strategy behind this (and many at EA did just that, quite frankly). I don’t for one minute.

In this, the 20th year of this storied game franchise, as far as I was concerned there was only one choice. As we look back over the past couple of decades in the NFL, Brett stands out to me personally as a beacon for everything that made me a huge fan of this great game from almost the moment I arrived from the UK in the early eighties (and became a fan of the LA Rams, with Vince Ferragamo at QB, but that’s a story for another posting…).

Forget all of his record-breaking stats – it was his approach to every game he played, his leadership and spirit on the field, his “gun-slinger” style in an era of robotic QB’s, and most of all the way he wore his heart on his sleeve for us all to see. I can’t forget the Monday night game versus the Raiders the night after his father unexpectedly died, when he threw for 399 yards and four touchdowns. Unless you were wearing silver and black that night, you both cheered and cried for him.

His fight with addiction to prescription drugs, his wife Deanna’s battle with cancer soon after his father died…all of this makes this good old boy from Mississippi one of my favorite players of all time. Nobody deserves more to be on the cover of our game this year than Brett Favre. So you can question whether having a retired player on the cover is a smart move, but we made this decision for one reason, and one reason alone… because it was the right thing to do.