Rejoice, Ravens fans. Madden NFL 13 has Baltimore winning the Super Bowl with a last-minute field goal by Justin Tucker.
EA Sports' annual simulation of The Big Game puts the Baltimore Ravens on top of the San Francisco 49ers in a 27-24 finish to Super Bowl XLVII. Oh sure, the oddsmakers at Ladbrokes have the Niners as 4/7 favorites, and the data geeks parsing Twitter traffic nine ways from Sunday also put the Niners on top. But they don't have the AI power of the Madden franchise, do they?
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The NFL'S Rush to Build Unbreakable PlayersDo not underestimate the power of *Madden'*s AI. The franchise has correctly picked the winners of seven of the last nine Super Bowls -- including the New York Giants’ thrilling upset over the New England Patriots last year. Madden also nailed eight of the 10 playoff games this season, just missing on the Atlanta Falcons’ late comeback to beat the Seattle Seahawks and the Ravens’ surprise win over the Patriots.
In this year’s simulation, the Ravens held a 14-point lead heading into the fourth quarter, but the 49ers evened the score on a Frank Gore touchdown run followed by a TD pass from Colin Kaepernick to Vernon Davis. The Ravens responded by calmly moving down field behind quarterback Joe Flacco in the final two minutes, finishing the drive with Tucker’s 40-yard kick. The game ended when Ed Reed intercepted a last-ditch San Francisco pass in the end zone.
The magic behind *Madden'*s detailed predictions lies in the extensive numerical values assigned to each player’s skills, and in the lengths EA goes to keep those numbers up to date. Players are rated on a 100-point scale on as many as 79 attributes, some of which -- speed, strength, acceleration and agility -- are shared by all players and others of which are position-specific, like throwing power and accuracy for quarterbacks and elusiveness for running backs.
All this data is fed into the computer and crunched. The data, and the ratings, are updated weekly based on game film provided by the NFL. This lets EA push regular updates that reflect all aspects of a team’s tendencies. When the 49ers’ formations and play-calling shifted when they ditched quarterback Alex Smith for Kaepernick, those changes were also reflected in Madden 13.
“The NFL office talks to us like we're the 33rd franchise,” said Cam Weber, EA Sports' football general manager. “We have total access, just like the NFL players and coaches do. And then we go in and make sure our teams are playing as accurately as possible.”
Picking a winner, however, involves more than just choosing the team with the highest overall rating. The difference, Weber said, lies in the details and how one player’s individual traits match up against his rival. And a groundbreaking element of the game, introduced in this version of Madden, amped up the realism and gave those one-on-one interactions more influence in the outcome. A real-time physics engine, called the Infinity Engine, introduced more realistic collisions and their outcomes.
In previous versions, when a defender hit someone, gamers saw a canned sequence of animations: a player getting tackled or a player breaking a tackle. The Infinity Engine makes every tackle and collision different, so an off-center hit could, for example, more easily lead to the ball carrier spinning away and recovering to gain more yardage.
“It basically just creates more of an organic collision and look to what the human body's doing,” Weber said. “The character’s body then reacts based on the physical forces in run-time, so physics calculations occur on the fly as it's happening.”
This is all well and good, and it's sure to give Ravens' fans a psychological boost, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the folks at Ladbrokes or the sports books in Las Vegas. Although they too study historical and recent trends, adjust for outstanding circumstances like injuries and weather conditions, they come to an entirely different conclusion than Madden. Most have the Niners out ahead, though we should point out that odds don't exactly equal a prediction. International odds-maker Ladbrokes, for example, has the 49ers as the odds-on 4/7 favorites with the Ravens as outsiders at 31/20.
"Unfortunately Madden does not have an impact on the odds," said spokeswoman Jessica Bridge.
Jimmy Vaccaro, a longtime Las Vegas bookmaker for odds-makers William Hill, said his outfit starts with a power rating for each team; the rating is adjusted upward as a team gets better and more people place bets. Right now, the 49ers are holding steady as a four-point favorite, which Vaccaro said is the standard around the state.
"With a game of this magnitude you don't know whats going to happen," he said. "I've seen these games make crazy turns right before kick off. The money will carry us from here on out."
Still, EA is betting it's got the outcome nailed. Time will tell.
