Titans or Steelers.  What do you think?  As interested as I am in tonight’s opener, I’m more worried right now about the Cardinals.  I selected Larry Fitzgerald in the first round of my fantasy football draft Tuesday night, and then added Kurt Warner as my starting QB in the second.  I guess I know who I’ll be rooting for this year (in addition to my beloved Pats).

Feels like just yesterday that I was watching Super Bowl XLIII, and here we are seven months later with another season upon us.  Of course, we went on to put both Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald on the cover of Madden this year, and as the presenting sponsor of NFL Kickoff weekend, we couldn’t be more excited to see the start of the NFL season finally upon us.

Madden continues to bring in a record number of gamers competing online, we’re very pleased with the great critical acclaim for a product we’re quite proud of, and yesterday we expanded the franchise to the App Store for the first time.  Now you can play Madden on your iPod touch and iPhone.  It’s Madden, so of course you have all the NFL players, teams and stadiums, along with full control over team depth charts, cross-team trading, modes like Play Now or Season, and John Madden coaching tips.

Hopefully you also saw that we’ve just re-launched EA SPORTS Football World (available in English, French and German) and also our new Game Face tool.  It lets users upload photos of their face to EA SPORTS Football World and EA SPORTS.com to create their virtual likeness on the sites.  Players can then download their Game Face to be their Virtual Pro in FIFA Soccer 10 like I did.

Game Face takes player creation to the next level in FIFA with unrivalled physical likeness and, in my case, makes my dream of playing for my Mighty Reds of Liverpool finally possible.  And talking soccer, delighted to see England booking their tickets to South Africa with the surgical dismantling of Croatia this week (including two goals from Stevie G). Could this be the year??? 1966 is such a distant memory now…

Few other thoughts:

- Springboks - thanks for your posts about rugby. Right now, we have no plans to develop and publish a rugby game.

- Red Sox continue to splutter their way towards the play offs (hopefully). A season that started looking like we had more pitching than we knew what to do with is finishing with only Jon Lester as the only reliable arm in the rotation. Unfortunately, the Yankees look unstoppable this year…