[B]Do today's football players that play Madden NFL games have an edge over their counterparts that don't? It is an interesting theory posed by [/B][URL=http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_gamechanger/][B]a Wired magazine article[/B][/URL][B] and expounded upon in the [/B][URL=http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/madden-as-the-new-game-film/][B]New York Times Fifth Down blog[/B][/URL][B].[/B]

In the Wired piece, it leads with the recreation of a real play in a Denver-Cincinnati game at the start of the 2009 season. With the Broncos trailing 7-6, they scored on an 87-yard pass play with 11 seconds left. While the touchdown was remarkable, the analysis focused on receiver Brandon Stokley's reaction as he reached the goal line. He ran parallel to the goal to shave six extra seconds off the clock BEFORE crossing the line, a move seen countless times in the Madden games. The author later got Stokley's reaction:

[INDENT]When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: “Is that something out of a videogame?” “It definitely is,” Stokley said. “I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame “probably hundreds of times” before doing it in a real NFL game. “I don’t know if subconsciously it made me do it or not,” he said.[/INDENT]Stokley's revelation that "everybody" in the NFL plays Madden led to an aanlysis of sports games and how future athletes grew up playing them. While it stops short of saying that it makes these future players smarter, it did cite some examples:

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