Triple Click - Is The Madden Curse Real?

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

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First, someone tells you you're cursed. Then you fall out an elevator shaft. Was it the curse or would it have happened anyway? And how are you going to get out of that elevator shaft? Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. This week, Jason's brought in a mystery for us to try to solve. Why do players featured on the cover of Madden games always seem to do badly afterward? It's time to solve or try to solve the mystery of the Madden curse.

I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Jason Shire. And I'm Maddie Myers. And it's a podcast. Hello. It's a podcast, and it's a podcast. Here we are. Triple click, it's a podcast.

That's our unofficial motto, I think. Triple click, it's a podcast. It works. I like it. It does. It's nice to see the two of you, and it's nice to know that all of you out there are listening. Thanks so much, as always, to everyone who's become a member of Maximum Fun. And just as a little reminder, four members, this coming Monday, the 31st of August, you will get our next beans cast.

This is a beans cast on Time Loop movies, including Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Russian Doll, and Palm Springs, not just including, actually, it's just those four movies. But we're going to be talking about all of them, the rules, how it all works. It does, it does include them, I guess that's true. But including usually... It just includes nothing else. Right, implies to do something more. We don't talk about anything else.

It's only those four things. So if you want to become a member and support us making this show, that is awesome. We are entirely listener supported. You can go to maximum fun.org slash join. And if you do that, you get access to that beanscast, plus all the other ones that we've recorded and the monthly beanscasts that will be recorded. down the road. So thank you so much again to our members. And last thing before we get started, as always, you can get in touch with us at triple click at maximum fun.org. And you should feel free to do

so because we sometimes read questions on the show, talk about stuff that you write in, and we do read all of your emails regardless. It's true. It's true. So, Jason, I understand that there is a fun mystery that we're going to be talking about. Yeah. So today we are going to be introducing a new segment to Triple Click. This is called Video Game Mysteries. Dund, Don, Don't. Don't. ton-t-ta-t-ta. So, in video game mysteries, every so often we are going to look at video game history and pick a mystery of some sort and try to analyze it. A history mystery. You could say to, yeah, go back in time and figure out a history mystery. Maybe sometimes we'll do some, get on, get on the phone and do some digging. Maybe sometimes we'll just do a future mystery? Maybe we'll

go more in time at some point. We'll cause a mystery to have it. Maybe one of us will die and we'll have to figure out how. We'll have to solve the mystery. One of us will get killed live on the air. That'll be in year two. That'll happen. Yeah, it's going to get really wild. But for now, we're only doing history mysteries. Right. For now, history. I mean, you need a season two plot twist to really keep people hooked. Of course, that's true. That's true. This week's mystery is a very interesting one, and this is one that we are going to solve using the internet. And I have some theories. I have some questions, but let's get to it, Chali. So before we even start,

Before we even start, before we even get into the mystery, I want to tell you both about a man named Peyton Hillis. Peyton Hillis. Now, Peyton Hillis was a big guy. He was a running back. He joined. So he's a football player. He played football running back. He played football in college.

And then he became a seventh round pick in the NFL picked by the Denver Broncos. Nobody really knew who this guy was. Seventh round picks are generally like, forget about them. far down the line. Yeah. Some of the round is the final round of the NFL draft. It's generally where you like, you turn off the TV, you turned off the TV a while, you go at that point if you're watching.

Unless you're waiting to get picked by the NFL. Right. Unless you're desperately praying. He was, uh, he was nothing special. He had a pretty good, he had like a decent first year in Denver. He would play fullback and running back. Fullback is kind of, is the position where you're like in front of the running back and you're like blocking for the running back.

So you just have to be a tank and this dude is built like a tank. And then he, barely played his second year because he disagreed with, like he got, didn't get along with his coach. So he wound up getting to Cleveland, joining the Cleveland Brown. So 2010 season. He starts off way in the bottom of the depth chart because usually seventh round picks who bounce around the league are on the bottom of the depth chart. They're just there as filler, like for bodies, warm bodies, because you need a warm body to occasionally block for you. But other players start getting injured because that happens in the NFL and he makes his way up

and he gets a chance to play. Very real 42nd Street situation for this guy. Week three of the season, he plays against the Ravens, and he has 144 yards, which is incredible. That's an excellent stat for a game. In general, 100 yards is considered a really good benchmark. 144 is excellent. And then he just keeps breaking out from there.

By the end of the season, he has rushed for over 1,000 yards, which is great. So this is where he starts standing out, right? People start giving him all sorts of ridiculous nicknames. People start rooting for him. he becomes a huge fantasy football guy and like pick it if you pick him up off the waiver wire you win your season spring of 2011 right and the makers of madden NFL the football game the football video game say hey we're gonna do a fan tournament to see who makes it on the cover of our game this year because every every year there's a new athlete on the cover and this time they're they're doing a fan tournament um so you have all these

superstar players competing and the fans are voting there's like ray rice matt ryan aaron rogers Michael Vick, who was doing incredible, like all these incredible players, winner of the fan tournament is the one and only Peyton Hillis. Wow. I never would have guessed that he was going to win. I know me either. Now, this is, in part because he just had this amazing season, part because of a kind of jokey, jokey thing, like the type of thing where he wins the fan contest.

But he winds up on the cover of Matt in NFL, and it's awesome. And everyone's like, wow, this guy is probably going to be pretty good. He winds up, if you play fantasy football, he's probably like in your top top. 10 running backs this next season. But the season starts, and things get a little bit rocky. He can't get a new contract. He sits out of a game with strep throat. He injures his hamstring a couple times. By the end of the season, he is off the team. He is no longer on the Cleveland Browns. He bounces around. He winds up on the chiefs, the buccaneers, the giants. By 2015, he has retired and not done anything else. So there wasn't like an inciting incident that got him off the team.

It was just like a series of small irritation. It was just a series of small injuries. Just this, like, it's one of those things where it happens in the NFL where someone just, but I want to read you a quote from Peyton Hillis. And this is from the AP at the end of 2011. There's a few things that happened this year that made me believe in curses. Ain't no doubt about it. So for many, many years now, there has been a phenomenon in Madden NFL called the Madden curse to the point where if you are an athlete in the NFL, some of the Some athletes have reportedly not wanted to be on the cover of an athlete because they, Madden, because they were worried about getting cursed. So if you look at the who's who of like who is a Madden cover athlete, you, you see this like remarkable string of bad luck and injuries and all these crazy things that have happened to all of these guys who are on the cover. So the reason that I'm bringing this up is because Madden NFL 21 actually comes out this

week. It is Madden season. So the Madden Curse has just existed as this entity for years. Everybody talks about it. Everybody mentions it. Like, announcers will say, like, oh, my God, like he's injured. Madden Curse, Madden Curse. But here, something interesting happened this year.

Last year, on the cover of Madden NFL 2020, I think it was just called 20, um, patch, it was Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs. Patrick Mahomes, midway through last season, had a kneecap injury and was out for about three games. And it was just like, oh man, like Maddenkirce strikes again. Yeah, I remember it. I remember talking about it. But he came back.

And not only did he come back, he took his team to the Super Bowl and won the Super Bowl in remarkable fashion. Those of you split screeners who were listening last year will remember our recaps and are talking about the Super Bowl. It was a phenomenal game. It was remarkable to watch him. Not only that, he recently signed a deal, a 10-year deal, the biggest deal in NFL history, for something like $500 million. Something absurd. And so he's doing okay, despite being on the cover of Madden, which leads to the question. This is kind of the question that we're going to be trying to solve here.

Is there really a Madden curse? Or is it just that it happens to be that injuries are so common or like misfortune is so common in the NFL that like, of course, a bunch of these players would get hurt? Or was there a curse and Patrick Mahomes broke it? That could also be possible. There could have been a curse for several years. I would say that as a possible outcome is was there a met and curse? Was there a curse? And did he break it?

Well, so the next cover athlete is Lamar Jackson, who's another superstar quarterback, incredible athlete. And he better hope that Patrick Holmes broke the curse for him. I mean, did he cause COVID to happen, though? Because I feel like this year's pretty cursed when it comes to any professional sports career. You're really having a tough time. Maybe that's true. Maybe that is a.

other possibility is that the Madden curse only doesn't operate. It's revenged on us all. Well, no, the Madden curse only doesn't work when the rest of everything is cursed. And so it's like an inverse thing where the Madden curse only goes into effect when other things are not exceedingly cursed. And we just needed to stop putting out Madden in order for things to be right again or who can truly say. Well, I feel like we need more evidence in order to determine if there was a curse over the years. Yeah, so let's go back in history a little bit and let's look back at some of the Madden athletes and we can talk about this a little bit. So Madden for a long time, Madden NFL started by Coach Tom Madden who was a legend in the NFL and for a long time he was on the cover of the game.

Until Madden 99, which starred an athlete named Garrison Hurst and he was injured almost immediately the season after he was put on. I'm just going to rant. I'm just going to rant. like, uh, rattle off a couple of names here and tell their stories. Eddie, there's Eddie George,

um, who was, uh, who took the Titans to the playoffs. He was on the cover of men in 2001. Um, he actually didn't get hurt that season and like, he was amazing that season.

But then they're playing the playoffs and the Titans lose to the Ravens because he bobbles a pass and it lands in a defender's hand. Wow. The defender intercepts it. Um, there's Dante Culpepper, who was on the cover of the next year. He had a lot of struggles,

a back injury. There was Marshall Falk, another all-timer who had an ankle injury right after the Madden thing. Matt in 2004 was Michael Vic who had an injury five days after the game came out. And also, obviously, the whole dog-fighting incident. There was Donovan McNabb who was injured right after Sean Alexander, Brett Farr, of Troy Palomalo, Drew Brees. These are all players who were on the athlete and were injured that season.

So it's not just like injured eventually. It's always injured that season. And does it have to be a debilitating injury in order for it to qualify for the curse or are we willing to take just anything? It's debilitating enough that they missed at least one game, I would say. And that's true of all these. I mean, some of them, like Sean Alexander, he fractured his foot and his career was never the same.

With a lot of these, such as Peyton Hillis, I mentioned before, it was just like, they were heard in some way and their career was derailed. In some cases, it was just like childhood career, or their careers and their hopes of, like, getting into the Hall of Fame had been, were just demolished. Like, they were on track to reach the Hall of Fame and then just couldn't. But I want to talk about a few other. interesting cases because one of the reasons that I think the Madden Curse has gotten so popular as a concept is that it's not just injuries that happen to these players. So I want to give you a

couple more examples. Calvin Johnson. Calvin Johnson was on the cover of Madden 13, so that was in 2012. And he actually had a really good season right afterwards. He did pretty well. So this is a guy who was a wide receiver. He is, he was on track to be one of the greatest wide receivers ever. He was incredible. He would regularly catch for 1,500. One year he had 2,000 yards. which is just astonishing numbers. In 2016, out of nowhere, he announced that he was retiring. He just had this surprise retirement, like, way before he needed to. He was still on top of his game.

He was just like, I don't want to play anymore. The ghost of John Madden had visited him in the night and was like, man, you got to get off the field. You got to get out. Here's another one. I already mentioned Michael Vic. Obviously, that's a crazy story. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

So the guy retired, and that's an example of the curse in effect? Well, he retired like 10 years before he could have. Like he retired like totally out of the blue, unexpected surprise. Okay, but this is part of why I feel like this curse is very funny. Kirk is already getting at some of the issues with it, which are that the rules to it are so broad. Right. That they become. Right.

It's like the Q&N on of curses. Let me, okay. That's a little much. Let me throw a, for instance, at you though. So if you're, if you're, if you're, on. on the cover of Madden and you have been, things have been going pretty well for you in the aftermath of that and you've maybe saved up some money and your body is intact, maybe you would retire a little bit early and say, I'm going to get up while the getting's good. Now,

my point here is that that does not disprove the curse. It just means that he was smart about it and bailed before the curse could take him. So I'm saying that does not, I'm not necessarily throwing this up as contrary evidence. I'm saying maybe this guy just kind of... It's merely an additional piece of evidence. Right, he played the game very smartly. So a counterpoint is that, so Calvin Johnson was on the Detroit Lions.

The Detroit Lions were kind of a cursed team for a very long time. They still kind of are. And he got stuck with a lot of like, like not great situation, basically. He was playing for a quarterback named Matt Stafford. He was pretty good, but like never, never could take him to a Super Bowl.

So he probably retired because he knew he had no hope of actually making it to a Super Bowl, and that's what's kind of sad about the whole thing. But, okay, this is kind of a flimsy one. But I have a stronger, I have a couple more stronger examples. Matt in 2014. Adrian Peterson. You guys know who Adrian Peterson is.

Yeah? I don't. I know the name, yeah. Okay, so he's a famous running back. He made headlines that year for the wrong reasons because just a couple of months after Madden came out when the season started after about one or two weeks, he was indicted on child abuse.

charges because he had, there's all sorts of, I won't get into all the details, but basically he was accused of like hitting his kids with a branch and it was just really ugly stuff. And he wound up, like, didn't play the entire season. So there's

a case of like, man, something really unusual happened as a result of this. But it was kind of his own doing though. Like that doesn't seem like it's in the same category as some of his other things. Like, well, it happened right after the cover athlete, even though he had been doing this for a long time.

Okay, but wouldn't you say that some of this has to do with the increased scrutiny of the career level that you have to be at in order to be considered to be on the cover of Madden? Like, that's part of why I feel like there would be a fallout after you're on the cover, because the cover signifies something pretty specific in real life, which is you are now a household name on some level, or at least you are to football fans who play video games, and so you get to be on the cover, which might mean that more people, are looking into your past, for example, it might mean that you personally feel more pressure

on the field or even are asked to do more. Like, there's, there are other extenuating circumstances outside of being on the cover beyond just, it's the cover. Right. And the very things that would cause you to be on the cover of Madden are also the things that would cause you. Right. Can be your downfall. To be in higher risk positions and also to have people paying more attention to you. Yeah, I'm not so sure about the this guy was an asshole or did something bad part of this curse. But people didn't find out until after he was famous. Crazy how that works. Right. Yeah. I mean, so Adrian Peterson was famous for a while before that. But yes, definitely, definitely a fair point. I want to go through a couple more. Rob Grankowski, Madden, he was on the 2017, madden in 2017.

And he just, I mean, he had been pretty injury prone before. So this wasn't exactly a shock. But this was like, him just missing game after game because of back injuries and hamstring injuries and he was just super, super hurt. So that was kind of like a classic Madden curse example. Although one funny thing is that the Patriots won the Super Bowl, even though he wasn't playing, even though he was on injured reserve. So he wound up winning the Super Bowl from the Madden from even though he was suffering from the Madden curse. But here's another, I think this is a good example of the Madden curse. Here's another strong, strong argument in favor of the Madden Curse. Madden 18, the 2017-18 season. The cover athlete for that game was the one and only Thomas Brady. Now, Tom Brady had obviously

been a superstar for 20 years before this, and this was, he had already been MVP a bazillion times. He was already like on top of his game, greatest quarterback of all time. When the season came in, he won MVP. Again, did not get hurt, played impeccably, took his team to the Super Bowl. That year, the Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles. You may remember this because that is where Tom Brady got to meet a certain NFL quarterback named Nicholas Foles. Nick Foles, the backup quarterback for the Eagles, defeated Tom Brady in one of the most ridiculous football games ever played. I would say that Tom Brady, getting to go all the way to the Super Bowl and losing to a

backup quarterback qualifies as a Madden Curse. What say you two? I mean, it's pretty humiliating. Exactly. It hasn't ended his career, question mark? I mean, Tom Brady is in a weird position now, right? No, he's on a new team for the first time ever. My mother is yelling at the podcast right now that I don't know every single thing there is to

know about Tom Brady. Sorry, Mom. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. I guess I'm saying Tom Brady turned it around. Like, he's going to be okay. Well, he didn't need to turn anything around. He had already won four or five Super Bowls at that point. But he, right now he's not on the Patriots, but that's besides the point. He went to a different team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he'll be playing for the first time ever this season, which is interesting. But that's besides the point. The point is that like, here's the greatest quarterback of all time. He is humiliated. He is outduled by a backup quarterback who like came out of nowhere to defeat him.

I think that's a pretty, pretty remarkable example of. It's pretty bad. I, I feel like to me the most compelling curse arguments are the injury ones, but only because I think just as a person who enjoys stories, I like the spooky curse story. So that to me feels like a better curse narrative if they're on the cover and then

they get injured. But not all of the curse narratives follow that pattern. Some of them are like, just something bad happened to them. And the bad things can be a huge variety. So the injury one is the of the, of the arguments. It's the flimsyest because so many NFL players get injured. Like your chances of getting injured are just as high as your chances of, like, in fact, I would say you have a greater chance of getting injured at some point in the course of the season than you do have like going, being healthy for 16 games. Like the NFL season is way too punishing and the sport is way too punishing for people not to get

injured. And so that, that is where the things kind of, but, but it is a remarkable, just track record of these things happening. Okay, so, but, but yeah, I mean, all these people, McNabb, Alexander, all these people just got injured. Now we get to Madden NFL 19. This is another really interesting one. The cover athlete on Madden NFL 19 was Antonio Brown, a wide receiver who at this point was pretty, pretty legendary and famous within the football world. He had already, like, was on on track for a Hall of Fame career. He played on the Steelers for a long time and just seemed to be like this rising star and he was traded from the Steelers. He didn't want to, he stopped getting along with his quarterback, Big Ben, and he was traded to the Raiders and the Raiders gave a bunch

of draft picks. They were really excited about this trade. Suddenly, over the summer, so the NFL has this TV show that they produced in partnership with HBO called Hard Knocks that goes behind the scenes of an NFL training camp. And so it happened to be the Raiders. And we have to be the Raiders. And we happened to get this glimpse at Antonio Brown. But suddenly all these strange stories started coming out, like that the NFL had had this helmet rule that you had to wear a specific type of helmet, and Antonio Brown refused to play by it. And like he wanted his own custom helmet that he had made. And there was a giant, like really weird, like three week long story about Antonio Brown, like sitting out of practices over this helmet thing and like refusing to play

unless he can get his helmet. Then during one particularly gross scene in, and in the hard knocks, we saw Antonio Brown's foot. And it looked like, it looked like a monster. Like it looked like a D&D creature, like one of those creatures with like bulbous masses. Or like a bloodborne creature, like bulbous masses all over their bodies. Except it was his foot. Did he have like blisters and stuff? Like what was going on?

It was giant blisters. It was like, it was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen on TV. And like he was injured by that apparently. And there was just all these strange things. happening in training camp. Then he wound up getting cut by the Raiders and signing with the New England Patriots. And then, like after the first week, second week of the season, a woman accused Antonio Brown of rape. And he was cut from the New England Patriots. He was also charged with battery and he has not played again. He's said a lot of things on Twitter clearly not.

That's definitely cursed. You could just end it all here, I think. I have a all of these men been tweeting? Because I feel like we can just go ahead and say their curse. Oh, well, that's, that's fair. Yeah, the Madden Curse forces you to tweet, which is the real problem here. But yeah, man, this was, this was a really sad and horrendous story. And like this dude, I mean, yeah, nobody really knew any of this stuff and nobody had any idea, like, who he was as a person until all this stuff started coming out after the Madden cover. None of this is related to the Madden cover, except for the fact that he was clearly cursed. That all of it is because of the Right, of course.

Yeah. But it's not like he was suddenly subject to levels of scrutiny. He wasn't in the past because he was always like the superstar player. That part's kind of interesting since it's my theory that being on the cover just indicates a pinnacle of your career and that therefore you'll start backsliding. So with a lot of these athletes, it's like they're already superstars and then they're put in the cover to honor that. Like Tom Brady, Brett Farbeck back in the day. A lot of these athletes, they were actually on the cover like towards the end of their careers. Peyton Hillis is one of the rare exceptions

where it's like he was barely anything and then he got put on the cover but that was because of the fan vote. Usually they save it and now Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes are both like second, third year stars to be on the cover. So it's a mix of both I guess,

a mix of veterans and new players. I know that Peyton Hillis was put on after a vote but how is the average player put on the cover of Matton? What is the process for this decision? Yeah, well so there are, it changes from year to year. They've done the fan tournament thing a few times.

Sometimes they do multiple covers and they do like, we're going to honor like this legendary player alongside this thing. Usually it's just the developer's picking. Like the developer is just, I assume they have some war room where like the directors of Madden all get together and they're like, here's what we're going to do. And I'm sure they do it in conjunction with the NFL. Or they might work with the players representation as well.

Like for all we know, it's something you lobby for. Yeah, well, the athlete has to agree. And there have been athletes in the past, the Danian Tomlinson, who was this fin, fantastic running back back in the day for the chargers and then the jets. He chose not to be on the cover of Madden. And I think he said it was because of like contract reasons, but I think it's because of the curse. But fans of the curse just went wild, I'm sure. Because speculation. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I, what I was going to say about all of this is that, okay, so I don't,

I don't really believe in curses generally, but I am from Boston. I, my parents are big Red Sox fans. was raised to have some healthy acknowledgement of curses. And in, for example, wearing the same shirt if the socks are winning, these types of fun engagements with sports curses are socially acceptable where I live. And so I think that that part of a curse can become kind of real in sort of a placebo effect way, where if you believe something is true, you can sabotage yourself. So I'm curious, and we'll never know, but I am curious about how much that could impact somebody who believed in the curse or even if they thought they didn't believe in it. It probably does impact how you play and how you feel.

And like the yips are a very real thing in games. And that is always fascinating to me, like how your psychological well-being can play a role and how you play a competitive game. So in that sense, I think there could be something to the curse. The part of it that does not track for me is the stuff like, we learned that this band did a crime after he was on the... the cover of Madden. Those ones, I would not say fit the paradigm. But Kirk, what do you think? What's your ruling? Yeah, I'm with you on that. I think that there's, I would be, I would need more

data, I think, to really come up, come away with an answer here, partly because if you just looked at your average NFL player, like, what is the average for a given year or a couple of years, since it seems like the curse, this curse window has sort of been extended. Some people will have a great entire season and then things will go wrong. Sometimes they will immediately be injured or have something calamitous happen. I would be curious, just on average, the NFL seems like a very, like you said, Jason, a very injury-prone place. It's also a place where, you know, some players are elevated despite bad behavior.

And then that bad behavior comes out, whether it's committing crimes, you know, abusing family members, lots of things that does happen. The NFL also kind of covers that stuff up. Like there's a lot of sort of torrid, tawdry bad stuff happening behind closed doors in the NFL and any increased scrutiny will cause that to come out. So I'd want to see just sort of the average NFL player. What do they experience in a year? Yeah, and like what are the numbers?

Because then you could kind of get a sense of, is it actually the case that being on the cover of Madden then leads to an unusual amount of any of these things? I definitely have the skepticism about just bad behavior, doing something bad and getting caught for it, breaking the law. Is that curseworthy? Yeah, I don't know. Are you cursed if you do that?

No, you just kind of like did a shitty thing and got caught. Yeah, yeah. But in terms of like unusually bad things happening to you, really it just feels like injuries or like just it would need to be if I think for me to really believe in it was in it being a curse. It would need to be more outlandish things, you know, like a plane crashed on his house. Like just just losing. Final destination levels of silliness. Right. When I hear curse, that's what I think.

When I hear curse, I don't think, oh, was being. in a surprising upset in the Super Bowl by like a less good quarterback. That doesn't seem curse to me. That just happens in football sometimes. No, yeah. And the Tom Brady one is just kind of silly. So, okay, so here's an argument in favor of the curse. Okay.

I think in general, so like if you look at other, I want to look at the NBA 2K cover athletes. Because I feel like if you look up cover athletes in video games, I think in general you want to see like who's who of the best players of that. era, like the best players of that decade, right? So, like, I'm looking at the NBA, and it's like, okay, Shaq, Chris Paul, Alan Iverson, Kevin Durant, more Alan Iverson, Paul George, Griffin, Durant, Rose. Yeah, I mean, it all makes sense. This makes sense. It's not, it doesn't have a curse the way that Madden does. And, like, when you think of, like, the best players of this decade,

you look at the cover athletes and you say, okay, great, that makes sense. But if you look at the last two decades of Madden cover athletes, you see a lot of, like, Oh, hmm, what if? Like, but what if with this guy? But what if this guy did this? For example, you look at Donovan McNabb. Donovan McNabb, what if he hasn't had that one season ending injury? Sean Alexander, what if he hadn't gone downhill as fast as he did after being on the cover of Matton?

And Brett Farve, well, Brent Farve is another story. But like, Peyton Hillis is the obvious one, Calvin Johnson. Oh, like, what if things had gone a little bit differently with Calvin Johnson? What if things have gotten a little bit differently with Michael Vick, with Marshall Falk, with Dante Culpipar. Like a lot of these players, it's just like you see a lot of lost potential there. Now, granted, I think in the NFL, that's truer from a broader perspective than it is from the NBA. Like in the NFL, your career in general is a lot shorter. There are a lot of flash-in-the-plan types in the NFL in a way that there aren't in the NBA.

Like, in the NBA, it's much rare to have like a single great breakout season and then just go downhill from there. usually in the NBA, if you're really good for a season, you kind of keep that up consistently, with a few exceptions, Jeremy Lynn, for example, Lynn sanity. But in the NFL, it's a lot more common to have, like, these breakout players who have these amazing years, just because the variance is so, so much higher because it's only a 16 game season, and it's a lot easier to have, like, an amazing 16 game run than it would be to have, like, an 82 game run in the NBA. So that said, the Madencovers could be just like a sample size of that, the flesh and the the plan effect. But also, looking back at it, it's a lot of like, but what ifs, which I think is

interesting. It is. But you've almost pointed out why yourself by noting the inherent issues with the NFL and like football as a career. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it is. In that way, it's like a microcosm of the wider NFL issue. Yeah. It's like by acknowledging the curse, fans of football are acknowledging the flaws with their sport, but like not quite. That is, fundamentally, that is what we're talking about here. We're just talking about kind of like a way to ascribe the supernatural to the fact that this season, that this sport is like totally messed up and just totally destroys people. AIDS and abets bad behavior and also is very dangerous.

And both of those things aren't true. Yeah, I think that I'm coming away from this conversation thinking not that there is a madden curse, but that perhaps the NFL is itself curse. Yes. Ooh, that's the answer. I mean, I have always... That is true. enjoy just like the act of saying like oh the man and curse like it feels fun to me sure but yes i think

that is the takeaway here is that the NFL is cursed and the foot the sport of football which i love to death and we'll watch every sunday as long as i feel comfortable doing so which who knows how much longer that'll be as long as it's on um i will keep watching it as much as i can but um but the sport is inherently super fucked up and um paying people to be violent is probably going to encourage violent in their lives and also cause lots of injuries. And in general, I mean, yeah, football, pretty messed up. So curses are real. They are just much bigger and more vague than we thought.

Cool. We solved it. We solved it. On that note, now that we've solved the mystery of the mad and curse, why don't we take a break? And then we'll be back for one more thing. Shmanners. Noun.

Definition Rules of etiquette designed not to judge others, but rather to guide ourselves through everyday social situations. Hello, internet. I'm your husband host, Travis McElroy. And I'm your wife host, Teresa McElroy. Every week on Schmanors, we take a look at a topic that has to do with society or manners. We talk about the history of it. We take a look at how it applies to everyday life. And we take some of your questions. And sometimes we do a biography about a really cool person that had an impact on how we view etiquette. So join us every Friday and listen to Schmanors on Maximumfunn.org

Or wherever podcasts are found. Manners Schmaners. Get it. Hey, I'm Dan McCoy. I'm Stuart Wellington. And I'm Elliot Kalen. Together we're The Flop House. A podcast where we watch a bad movie and then talk about it.

Movies like Space Hobos. Into the outer reaches of the unknown and the things that we don't know the movie. And also, who's that grandma? Zazzle Zippers. Breakdown 2 and Backhanded compliment. Elvis is a policeman. Baby crocodile and the happy twins. Leftover potatoes?

Station wagon three. Herbie goes to hell. New episodes available every other Saturday. Available at maximum fun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye. And we are back. Kirk, Maddie, it is time for one more thing. Kirk, why don't you start us off?

Sure. So I got to visit with my nieces these past few days, which was really nice. They are nine. They are nine and six years old, and they have a Nintendo Switch, and so they have all kinds of questions for me. They have to share one? I'm curious about how that goes. Yeah, that's... They make it work.

It feels like that paradigm will not be in place forever. There's going to come a point at which there are probably two switches in the house. But for now, they share, and it's pretty much fine. You know, they're all very cooped up. I think being a kid right now would be very difficult on a lot of levels. But they're making do, and they've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing. That's sort of a fun thing that we've shared. But that's not the game I'm going to talk about.

I'm going to talk about Luigi's Mansion 3, which I don't believe I've talked about on Triple Click. I know I talked about it when I played it back in the split screen days, but I haven't talked about it on this show. They're very into it because they like watching me play it. So when I come visit, I'll play through a little bit more. I'm near the end of that game. I'm like on level 11 or something like that. and I had to go through this level in the sewers. This is the sewer level of this game.

Did either of you get to this level in this game to the sewer level? Jason, you played this game, right? Yeah, but I stopped after like the first five floors, unfortunately. One day I'll come back to it. Yeah, it gets good. Yeah, it's a funny one to come back to you because it's really difficult in some ways. I find it, there's an awkwardness to this game that I get back in the groove of it and I sort of feel okay with it. But just playing the game is sort of difficult, and I think it's all the fixed camera angle.

So Luigi's Mansion 3, this is a Switch game. It looks just like Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon and Luigi's Mansion 1, where there's this kind of dollhouse effect. You're kind of just looking in on each level. Luigi walks around, and you don't control the camera. That lets them make the game look really nice. It looks incredible. Oh, man, like on a big TV screen, I usually just play it on the Switch,

but I put it on the TV so that they could watch. It's like watching cartoons with everybody. Like, it looks so good. It looks like a Pixar movie. and that's because they can leave the camera in this one place. But as a result of that, you have to aim. Like, you aim with the right thumbstick, and it's all kind of relative. So you turn Luigi, like, 180 degrees, but then you hit a certain point at which the

thumbstick won't stop, won't continue being a one-to-one representation of where he's moving because it needs to switch to the other way. So you'll kind of rotate him around. They've done a lot of, it's, I'm not even totally sure what it is, but there's some degree where, like, if you keep going in a certain direction, it's, it's, holds for a little while, and so he keeps moving, even though it's like you're moving the opposite direction from your thumb. But then if you pick your thumb up and put it back down, you have to kind of start over again. It's like reset where the thumb stick is pointing you. Yeah,

yeah. Weird. So it's not a precise game. The game is very chaotic. You're mostly aiming a vacuum cleaner that just is like blowing and sucking like stuff everywhere. And like there's physics on everything. So like the point is kind of chaos. And whenever a ghost is fighting you, you're kind of running around in circles and the Ouija is yelling and jumping and there's, you know, objects and detritus flying around the screen. So it sort of supports it being a little bit imprecise, but there are times where you really need to be precise. And I was, so I was in the sewers, a lot of tricky, like, sewer puzzles. You know, you kind of have to, like, open up one pipe and then have the water go out and raise and lower the levels of the water. You can imagine. It's

a sewer level in a Nintendo game. Like, you raise them lower water levels. And I appreciate that you do a lot of plumbing in this level that Luigi has actually got a plunger and he is being a plumber because the Mario Brothers rarely actually do that in their games. Right. And you want realism in a Mario Brothers game. I do. I like to see that they're kind of keeping the skills home a little bit. Doing their jobs, obviously.

They're remembering how to be plumbers. Those guys went slacking for way too long. It's true. Off doing all these adventures and stuff. So the end of the game, a lot of this, there's a lot of water and then you'll get in a big rubber, ducky, like, floaty, like inflatable boat. And then you have to use that. the vacuum cleaner to blow yourself because it pushes and pulls air. And you use that to kind of move

around according to the physics of the level. But there are times where you have to be kind of precise. Like there are spikes that if you hit them, you kind of get knocked out of the water. So you're trying to steer while like blowing air out the back of the boat. But it's all relative aiming because you can't move the camera. So it makes it actually really hard. And there are times where it's really frustrating. Like you have to get down a whole like river level and there are ghosts that are sharks and there are spikes and you have to like time up with gooigi because you can like there can be two of you there's a goo version and you make a goo version of yourself everyone knows this it's classic it's and everyone does so coming back to this game i was just like go this game is

really complicated i had been kind of suggesting it to my nieces to get because they love it and they always love watching me play it and they're kind of you know they don't get that many games so they're kind of thinking about what's our next game going to be they can talk their parents into it since it's been a while and i'm like i don't know if you guys would actually like playing this game i don't know if you would have fun with it maybe We did like the first five floors. I feel like that was such a common experience for me at that age, although I just had Game Boy games where like Mario was really hard, but then like as I got older, I would like eventually

be able to beat certain things about it. And then that was really cool feeling. Right, right. So that might be a reason for them to get it. There is some charm to playing a game that you can't figure out out of beat over and over again. Yeah, but you can tell that someday you'll be able to. Yeah, I guess they probably would enjoy that. I'm sort of up against.

you know, do I just tell them to get Mario Odyssey or Black of the Wild or something? You know, because that will have a lot. Yeah, I mean, you know what, that game's pretty good. I take it back. They would probably find both of those games are pretty tough also. Yeah, that's the thing, especially compared to something like Animal Crossing. But I will say one of the advantages of one of those games is that if they get stuck on something, they can go and do something else, as opposed to Rage's Mansion, which is a lot more linear. Yeah, exactly.

Whereas, yeah, Mario Odyssey, you can just bop around and try different things. Exactly. Recharge your hearts. And there's so much just joy and jumping around and finding stuff. Yeah, there was a boss fight. At the end of this level, you fight this mechanic goes in a pit of water with spikes all around you. And it was so hard. I was like, I can't.

Like, they were watching me lose and get frustrated. I was like, this is bad. I'm setting a bad example. You were like playing it off. You're like, what adults do when they're gamers. So you're like, kids, I know I always tell you to not die. But I am dying. I am dying.

So do as I say, not as I do. So I wasn't actually getting angry or anything, but I was just sort of losing and it was frustrating. And I wound up just looking up how to beat him because it just is sort of complicated and difficult. And it was a reminder that that game is weirdly difficult at times because the controls are weird and they require precision. And it made me think, oh, maybe this isn't the recommendation that I thought it was, even though I do really like that game and only have a couple levels left. So I think that I'll finish it. Maybe I'll just finish it slowly. Like each time I visit them, I'll just plan through another level.

Yeah, and each time you'll be relearning how to play Luigi's Mansion. You know, would it even have been as hard, I wonder, if you had just played it straight through. You might not have thought it was. Yeah. If you're used to the controls. Yeah. I think maybe not, though I do think that this level is particularly frustrating because the water and the, like, scooting around the water adds a level of like imprecision to an already imprecise system, that then having it be spikes on the wall, like it's so unforgiving.

I think that that's particularly difficult. Just thinking back to the other bosses, there weren't any other fights that were like that, where, you know, you're in the water and getting knocked out of the water. and having to get back in, and there's so many steps to it, and it's so unforgiving. But it's still a cool game. Sounds frustrating. Sounds like maybe I don't need to go. Oh, no, because there's some levels that you haven't seen that are incredible.

There's some really good stuff. Just get to the sewer level and you stop right at the sewer. You just stop right there. Right. When you get to the sewer, though there might be something good after the sewer. Yeah, I don't even stay on my own. Sewer levels in general are just like, blah. Like we really need more sewer levels.

It's like enough already. Maddie, what's here one more thing? So I'm going to talk about Destiny 2 again. Yeah. Again, you guys heard of this little video game Destiny 2? One of us. I promise it's not the only game I'm playing. I am still playing Horizon Zero Dawn. I just, I have some thoughts on Destiny 2.

Me too. Me too. That game is fun, huh? Horizon Zero Dawn, good game. It is fun. It is fun, but this is one more thing, not one, two more things. So I'm only going to talk about one game. So Destiny 2 is about to remove a lot of content to June 2.

hear about this? I saw a headline at polygon.com but have not read it, but I know that they're doing it. Polygons covered it. Katak's covered it. All the websites are on, on it. A bunch of content is getting removed from Destiny too. And a lot of it is content, but I am in the middle of doing. And it is getting moved on November 10.

Well, you have until November. Yeah. That's not that far away, but it's also not. So that Destiny takes a long time. Yeah, it's taken me a while. And I was scrolling through this list. And a lot of it is like the kind of stuff that a newer player like me would finally be playing. Like the Red War, Curse of Osiris, Season of the Drifter.

Like these are the quests. Like I just beat the Red War one. I'm doing Season of the Drifter. Like these are the quests that I am doing. Chris of Osiris sucks. You can skip that. Great. I haven't started it.

So I'll just go ahead and skip that one. I've been trying to decrypt my umbral angrams or whatever. Shockingly hard to do. That's a silly phrase I just said. I remember what that is. Watching a bunch of YouTube videos. That's the other thing about Destiny. Nothing has ever explained in this game.

I'll go on a little detour briefly and say, please, go ahead. The number of times in this game that it has not been clear what you are supposed to do, and I have Googled it, and I have found just like dozens and dozens of Reddit threads of other people who also had no idea what to do. Usually when I'm Googling something in a game, I find one Reddit thread. Maddie, that's how Polygon makes all of its revenue. Yeah, yeah, man. I know. Our guide section, shout out to Dave. He's running our guide section. He's killer.

Yeah, I'm not saying this in a critical way. Like, it's cool that Destiny is a game that can support websites. It is cool, but it is also absurd that the number of things that are not explained in this video game, for example, how to decrypt umbral angrams. Normally you just throw your ingrams. Can you explain what umbral engram? Okay. I can't even tell you, Jason, but there are these little glowing orbs because everything in Destiny is a glowing orb. And you go to the drift. who's at the tower. He's this super cool solid snake-looking guy with a bandana and he's got a furnace next to him and you toss your ingrams in this furnace and they decrypt and you like get a bunch of sparkles because it's a video game. Sounds about right. And you get cool shit. But you in this particular turning orbs into sparkles, the destiny's space. You get a bunch of orbs that you can't decrypt and you go to the furnace and

it's like, no, we won't take any of these orbs, dumbass. And you just have to like figure out a bunch of stuff in order to decrypt these particular orbs. And there's like one YouTube video that actually explains how to do it and a bunch of other YouTube videos that are terrible. Maybe I'll tweet this YouTube video for the other people out there listening who know what I'm talking about. So these have been my experiences with Destiny 2. Playing it, wondering why I'm playing it, looking up YouTube videos about how to do

tasks that seem like they shouldn't be that hard, finally doing the task, getting the dopamine hit of finally doing the task and being like, wow, that was so hard to figure out, retconning all of the times where I was Googling what I was even supposed to do, and the reason why it was difficult was because it was completely opaque within the game itself and instead just believing that I had somehow figured it out and achieved something. That is how Destiny 2 works for me. And yet, and yet I was still sad when I heard that all these quests were going to get vaulted, even though none of this matters. I don't know why I am sad about it and I should probably stop playing this game. Everything you just described also applies to Destiny 1 when it came out. And really,

the best six years of Destiny is just that description. Ironically, the reason they're vaulting all this stuff is so they can add in a bunch of Destiny 1 stuff. So I guess it'll all still be stuff I haven't played. And I'll be like, all right. So the real reason, well, so there are two real reasons why this is happening. One is because of everything you just said, like to a newcomer and even an older player, there's so much stuff that is just unexplained that is just lingering. And what they wind up doing is because so much stuff gets added and changed over time, it winds up with all this vestigial, like, it's just this hodgepodge of stuff, and every once in a while they have to flush out all the stuff that is old and obsolete at this point.

But the other, the biggest reason is file size, and because Destiny 2, you download it on your computer and all that stuff that you're seeing is not being streamed in. It's like on your computer. It's already probably 100 gigabytes, right? Like they don't want it to get 200, 300 gigabytes. It would be out of control. And so at a certain point, they need to say, okay,

well, this isn't being played that much, so we need to get rid of it in favor of the new stuff. Also, a lot of the stuff that's coming isn't Destiny 1 stuff. Europa, the big new planet is new. Yeah, there's other new stuff that they're putting out. Yeah, like completely new stuff that will be new to me and new to everybody. So that's cool. And I get why they're doing it.

I'm just like, it's funny that they're getting rid of the things that I happen to be playing. Bad timing. That's sad and funny, but also why am I doing any of this? I've been looking over this list of things that are leaving while you two have been talking. And it's been interesting. Well, to react to it as just someone who is going to play Beyond Light but hasn't played Destiny 2 in a long time, it's a lot of stuff that I won't miss. And I would imagine a lot of players won't as well.

Right. And I think that the sting of losing a thing that you're in the middle of Maddie is probably, I think hearing you describe your experience of all of these things, this ridiculous morguez board of information and. possible objectives that then you start doing, and it's just one thread of this huge tapestry of shit, and you start to then look up Reddit threads on like, how do I even do this thing? How do I get it? I do think that they're probably trying to eliminate some of that and turn the game into

a more focused experience. I should hope so. Because what I'm describing is actually terrible. And I guess I should also say the main reason that I'm playing this game is because I feel like it's the perfect game to play for 30 minutes to an hour, which is a situation that feel I've described before. But I often am in situations where I would like to play a video game, but I don't have very much time.

And so I'm like, oh, I'll just play a destiny quest or a couple quests. Or, like, right before bed, it moves so slowly that you can play some destiny and not feel like it's keeping you up all night. And, like, these are the reasons why people play this game and you end up just playing a lot of it because, and I'm like, I could have, I could have, like, plowed away at more story stuff. Horizon Zero Dawn. Well, you're also playing it with friends. It's important. It's important

to know that you're playing it as a social experience also. I am playing it with friends, but I'm also playing it by myself. Like, I don't know, guys. I'm in this You're playing in Destiny. Yeah, you're into Destiny. It's okay. No shame in being a Destiny player. I don't know how long it's going to last though. I guess I'll see what I think. At least until November, at least until

beyond line. I'm looking forward to be on light. Even reading this and knowing this stuff is all leaving. Yeah, well, I'll be back. I expect all three of us will be really. jumping in and November. We're going to play a lot. That's going to be fun. We're going to play a lot and this is just going to turn.

Every one more thing is just going to be like, all right, I want to talk about this and destiny. Everyone's going to get annoyed at that. I think we can spare our listeners that. We'll maybe try to put some restrictions in place. We can. But anyway, RIP to all of these quests, I'm going to decide which ones I care to beat by the end. If I want to beat all those whisper of the worm jumps and get the stupid worm gun, I'm going to have to do that before November time. Oh man. Yeah, we have to, we have to do that. It's like,

I was sort of joking about that, but yeah. But I have faith in your ability to do those jumps. Like, we have to jump back in. How badly do I really want a sniper rifle, though? It's not a weapon I use very often. It's a pretty good rifle. Okay, fair enough. So Maddie, have you thought about before, we'll move on in a second, but have you thought about like whether you want to like pursue the end game stuff and raids and dungeons and all the high level stuff? Yeah, a little bit. So I've been playing enough now that I have some friends who are trying to put together a raid group, and they are hassling the NDM about joining their raid. So if I do the raid, I will let the listeners know.

I'll let them know how it goes. Of course, I've warned all of them that I'm bad, as is the custom, Destiny greeting. You tell everyone that you are bad at the game, and everyone says, I too am bad. It's just a ritual that we all engage in together. No one is good, but also some people are good, but they must say that they are bad. That is simply how it works. Yeah, destiny raids around like anything else in the game, as you shall see, and we can talk about once you do one.

All right, I want to talk about something else entirely. I would like to talk about a TV show called Dark. Dark is a show on Netflix. It is a German show, so it is best watched in German with English subtitles. Even though when you play it, by default, it goes to like an English dub where, like, the mouths all look weird, and I would not recommend watching that way. I do not enjoy that. But anyway, it's a show that I think is best described.

as if lost, the TV show Lost, had its shit together. Because it feels a lot like Lost in a lot of different ways, but it's more tightly written and tightly solvable, and the puzzle box of it all is just like it actually makes more sense and holds up. And it's very clear that they had this plan from the beginning and they're not just making things up as they go along. So the concept of the show,

and by the way, I should say that one of the reasons I'm watching this show is because so many people over the past couple of years, both on split screen and triple click have reached out to say, you guys have to watch Dark, you have to watch Dark, you have to watch Dark, you have to watch Dark. And finally, this year in June, I believe, they released the third and final season. So I was kind of waiting for it all to be out, so I didn't have to wait. So it is now over.

So it is all complete. Good time to watch something like that. I am four episodes away from finishing. By the time this episode air, I will probably be done. It is incredible. I really, really like it. It is captivating. So the concept of the show is that basically,

it's about a small German town named Winden. And this town named Wendon is built around this nuclear power plant. And it's about all of these families in this town and the way that the secrets that they're all hiding and the way that they interact and their relationships with one another. And a lot of different characters and time travel plays a major role in the story. And I think that's pretty much all I can really say without getting too spoilery is that It's a story about time travel and families and love and loss and all those other great things. It really has.

The reason I compare it to the show Lost is because it really does those character relationships that Lost does. It does those pretty well. It's not like there aren't characters as memorable as like Sawyer and Said and Jack, like, and to the same extent because that show was really just like top, top, top tier at like memorable characters. But you still see a lot of, like, there's a lot of love in the show and there's a lot of, like, hatred and jealousy and, like, all the emotions that you want to see, like, from interesting character dynamics. So it really nails that.

But it does the puzzle box so much better than Lost Ever did. And just, like, the way that every episode, every episode ends is some new revelation and just, like, things that didn't make sense before suddenly makes sense. And you're just seeing all these puzzle pieces fit into place. And it's an amazing experience to watch. even though sometimes you have to be like, wait a minute, who's that again? Because there are so many faces and characters that you really need, like you need a notebook. My wife and I just paused the show a lot and say, okay, that's this person who's related to this person through this and this and this. I like stuff like that, though.

I think I will watch this. You will love this show, Maddie. Maddie, you will love this show. Both of you will love this show because, I mean, yeah. Kirk will hate it, but I will love the show, so I will watch it. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's spoiler to say that because of the time travel of it all, you're seeing people at different ages. And so you have to like mentally keep track of like, oh, okay.

Oh, it's like The Witcher. This is one of these other 12 characters and this is one of blah, blah, blah, blah. And at a certain point, the show is actually really good at like showing you these montages of like split screens of like this person and this person. So it helps you connect the dots a little bit. But yeah, it's a it's one of those shows that so my wife and I when we watch TV, which we usually do at night after we put our kids asleep. We usually like to multitask like I'll be playing a switch game or like she'll be playing something. on her phone or playing Zelda or whatever. This is a show you cannot multitask at all.

A, because you have to watch the subtitles, but B, because you have to be focused the entire time. So that's the only warning for anyone who's thinking about getting into this is you have to be like 100% focused on the show. All that said, it is tremendous, and I highly recommend it to everybody, especially if you're into mysteries. Yeah, I'll watch it for sure. I've been planning to watch it for a long time,

and people have been recommending it for years, and I know it's good. So Dark is, it's only on Netflix because it's a Netflix-produced show, but if you have Netflix, you can watch it, dark. And yeah, again, it's in German. Yeah, and if you're starting it, my advice is to change it from the English dub to like German proper with English subtitles.

Yeah, that makes sense. Cool, yeah, so that's it for this week's episode. Hope you all enjoyed. And yeah, so we'll see all of you members on Monday, August 31st for the Beanscast, time loop Beanscast, and then everybody else and members, everybody, will see the following week

with another episode. Yeah, see you both. next week. Yeah. Bye. Triple-click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Triple-click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll head over to maximum fun.org slash join and consider becoming a member. Doing so helps support us and gets you access to an exclusive Triple Click episode each month. Find us online at Triple Clickpodcast.com

on Twitter at Triple ClickPod and send email to triple click at MaximumFun.org. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfunn.org. Comedy and culture. Artist-owned. Audience. Audience supported.