What Ben Roethlisberger's Suspension and Madden 11 Have In Common This Season

Two games into the young NFL season and already Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin is quoting Mark Twain (or close to it). The 2-0 Steelers were pronounced dead before even starting this year, a byproduct of Ben Roethlisberger’s off-the-field shenanigans

Yet, as so often happens in the NFL, life has gone on without the so-called irreplaceable. Though it’s been far from “pretty” (which is a word that, even in its most raw form, is not easily attached to professional football), Coach Tomlin’s team has shown that really REALLY good defense and a better than average running game can make up for not having a star quarterback.

"We're a little bit annoyed (about) the premature reporting of our death” noted Tomlin. The quote, similar to one of Mark Twain’s wittier responses, illustrates the fourth year coach’s frustration at being categorized as a one-man team.

But let’s make one thing very clear: Ben Roethlisberger is damn good. You don’t win 2 Super Bowls and win 15 games in your rookie season by being average. And even with an offensive line in 2009-10 that was as poor as a Steelers line has been in many years, Roethlisberger still sniped a 100.5 quarterback rating.

Not just that, but he was prolific as well as efficient. 4,328 yards passing and a gaudy 12.8 yards per completion average (higher than even Tom Brady in 2007) speaks to his talent.

The Madden franchise is not the type of program that suddenly devalues a quarterback who had a significantly better season the year before.

Basically, that would be saying that a 2008 season when he had a rating of only 80.1 and threw for a thousand less yards than he did in 2009 justifies a drop in his rating from a 93 to an 88? I mean, he was a lot better in 2009.

As this is clearly impossible under regular circumstances, the presence of unusual circumstances become self evident.

In other words, there is a significant chance that Roethlisberger’s rating was affected by his non-football problems. Did they in fact penalize him for being a womanizer? I suppose the better question might be, if they didn’t, what was the rating drop-off from then?

Granted, I realize many people don’t care about this since they either don’t play Madden or play but could care less. That’s cool; I realize most of you probably think I’m a total dork for taking actual time out of my life to talk about this. Whatever, I’m okay with it.

What I’m decidedly not okay with is the Madden franchise making the executive decision to base a quarterback’s rating of his football talent on non-football issues.  It’s a total mockery of the Madden system that they would do that.

And don’t try to explain it by saying “the Steelers overall nosedive in 2009 precipitated the drop in Roethlisberger’s rating” (since many other player’s ratings are tied to their team’s performance.)

That’s also a bunch of B.S. Drew Brees’ rating in last year’s version was well above 90 even though his team was coming off a 8-8 record the year before (which was worse than last season’s Steelers record of 9-7.)

In any event, Ben Roethlisberger’s Madden rating did inexplicably drop despite statistically improving dramatically. I put it to you that this happened because of his scandal.

Whether or not that’s okay with you is not for me to say, but just know that when I play online with the Steelers and Big Ben isn’t quite Big enough on 4th and 8 (a situation my poor Madden skills put me in all too often), I quickly realize how much I hate subjective ratings.