While many professional athletes moan about the in-game ratings assigned to them by EA Sports, the producers of Madden NFL 19 received a complaint from Dallas Cowboys defensive end Tyrone Crawford that was unlike any other. The Windsor, Ontario-born NFL athlete called out EA Sports for giving his in-game Madden NFL character model quite a gut, something which doesn’t reflect the 28-year-old player’s actual build.
Unhappy that EA Tiburon had ‘made his body look like Humpty-Dumpty’, Tyrone supplemented his public call-out by tweeting several real life mid-game photos of himself that indicate EA Tiburon seems to have greatly exaggerated the expanse of his gut. The tweet immediately took off, with many fans ribbing the player and saying that it looked like EA had things right the first time.
Gamers can see Crawford’s public call-out below:
For its part, EA Tiburon responded in a tweet that it would be reviewing Crawford’s player model, and a mere 6 hours later the studio made another tweet showing Crawford had already been updated with a much more accurate version of himself. While the studio may have given him an 80 overall in terms of skill, we’ve got to give EA Tiburon a 100 overall for that response time - though it’s questionable that Crawford didn’t have the right basic body build to begin with.
Crawford has started 59 out of his 77 games for the Cowboys, recording 16.5 sacks in his last 5 seasons. Now that EA Tiburon had added some creative post-sack animations, his digital avatar will now to be to express himself on the gridiron with some slick moves and presumably much less gut jiggling. No word yet on if PC modders will go ahead and put his gut right back the game.
Madden NFL 19 will release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on August 10, 2018.
