But the cover athlete WAS the Regular Season MVP. Doesn't that kind of destroy the argument?
There's no Madden Curse or Regular Season MVP curse. It's silly.
In the case of Madden it makes a lot of sense because usually the player has reached their career peak, hence they are on the cover. They were healthy that year, and football is (or used to be) a violent sport with a lot of injuries; in addition, it's likely that the player will return to the mean. Or in some cases (Peyton Hillis, for example), the guy was just so overhyped to begin with that he shouldn't have even been on the cover.
For Regular Season MVP curse, it's just somewhat of a statistical anomaly. But Brady (2007), Manning (2009), Ryan (2016), and Brady (2017) all had a lead in the second half of a Super Bowl but lost due to various reasons. It's not like they all went one and done; they were in good position to win the game but just haven't. Before this "curse" there were plenty of cases of Regular Seasons MVPs winning a Super Bowl, which is why it's just nonsensical to call it a curse. It can also be explained that before the salary cap era, usually the MVP was part of an incredibly dominant team that had a much higher chance of winning the Super Bowl with multiple Hall of Fame teammates, whereas now teams only have a few superstars and are less likely to win a championship, and in fact may be even less likely than other teams in the playoffs since the MVP is more likely to regress from that level (there's nowhere else to go.)
